The Botanics: glasshouses, rock garden, and the skyline view
Scotland's great botanic garden, the Victorian glasshouses, and the lawn with the whole city laid out behind it. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. East Gate, Inverleith Row
Start at the main entrance off Inverleith Row, past the John Hope Gateway visitor building. The garden is free to wander; only the glasshouses charge. Get your bearings here and head in west, away from the road and the noise.

2. The Glasshouses
The reason to pay the small ticket — the towering 1850s Temperate Palm House, still one of the tallest in Britain, and the rainforest and arid houses strung off it. Go in for the palm house alone; standing under that ironwork and glass is the warmest you'll be in Edinburgh all year.

3. The Rock Garden
Down the slope, the great alpine rock garden — a constructed mountainside of conglomerate stone, threaded with tiny high-altitude plants and a stream. Walk the winding paths slowly; this is horticulture as sculpture, and it changes completely with the season.

4. The Inverleith House lawn
Climb to the open lawn around the old Georgian house at the garden's high point. Turn south and the whole city skyline is laid out — castle, spires, Arthur's Seat — over the treetops. This is the photograph everyone takes, and it earns it. Sit a while.

5. The Chinese Hillside
The largest collection of Chinese plants outside China, planted up a wooded slope with a pavilion and a waterfall. Edinburgh has a long history of plant-hunting in the Himalayas and south-west China, and this is where it lives now. Quiet, and quietly spectacular in autumn.

6. Inverleith Park
Leave by the west gate into Inverleith Park — the public park next door, with a boating pond that mirrors the castle on a still day and playing fields running off towards Stockbridge. End on the pond's south edge; buses run from Inverleith back to the centre.

The Botanics: glasshouses, rock garden, and the skyline view