The Catacol Whitebeams of the East Gate

Until September 2020, the Catacol whitebeam was one of the rarest trees on earth: a single wild specimen, in one ravine on the Isle of Arran, tied with Wood's cycad for the title. Then a second wild tree was found. Before that, nearly everything standing between the species and extinction was a handful of grafts, and several of them grow here, beside the coffee shop at the Botanics' East Gate. The tree was only described as new to science in 2006. Seed germination has had limited success, so the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh propagates it by grafting cuttings onto ordinary rowan rootstock, and one of the garden's own staff records collecting berries from the East Gate tree in autumn 2014. That date is also the honest limit of what is known about these particular specimens. No source gives them a planting date or an age. They were grafted at some point after 2006 and were established by 2014, and beyond that they are undated. This is a planting rather than one heroic tree, with other Arran-only Sorbus species standing alongside it. Small trees, easy to walk straight past. The reason to stop is that the wild population, in a Glen Catacol ravine, could be taken out by a single winter flood, which RBGE staff say in plain words. These grafts are the insurance policy.