The John Muir Grove

A ring of Californian redwoods grows in Edinburgh, named for the Scot who helped save the Californian ones. John Muir was born in Dunbar, thirty miles down the East Lothian coast, emigrated as a boy, and spent his life arguing that America should keep its wild country rather than cut it down, work that ended in the national park system. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh put his name on this grove in 1990, seventy years after the trees themselves went in. They were planted in the 1920s in the Upper Woodland Garden and now stand over 24 metres, which for a giant sequoia is early adolescence: the species runs past 80 metres and 3,000 years on its home ground in the Sierra Nevada. What the planting got right was the arrangement. The trees form a circle, so the space they enclose is the destination rather than any single trunk, and the garden's own word for the effect, cathedral-like, is fair. Walk into the middle and stop. That is the spot, and the garden hires it out for ceremonies for exactly that reason. The pin here is set to the Upper Woodland Garden rather than the ring itself, because no source gives coordinates for the circle. At 24 metres and rising, it is not a difficult thing to find once you are in that part of the Botanics.