08/06/2026
What if Botanic Gardens aren’t (just) refuges for rare and threatened plants – but actually the source of the next waves of plant invasions? And how do human land management and gardening practices change the nature of the non-native plants that we grow or welcome in to our landscapes?
These are tough questions to explore and St Andrews Botanic Garden is part of international programmes that are trying to unpick them: here in the sand dune experiment you can see how we are working on the first question, with plants starting to establish amongst the sedges, marram and lyme grasses: some of these are native, like the foxgloves, others are non-native, like the tree lupins, some are introduced by us, like the Lilium lancifolium and Stanleya pinnata, others have arrived of their own accord, like the orchids and Viper’s-bugloss. In this experiment we are recording the abundance, distribution and physiology of these plants every year to see not just which plants are capable of establishing but where they spread to and how their behaviour changes accordingly.
The question of the biodiversity benefits of native and non-native plants is a separate but related question and for us here at SABG, links to the second question posed above, and which we are working on in the Games for Light experiment elsewhere in the Garden. It’s one of the hottest questions in horticulture at the moment and one that can only be addressed by these sorts of comparative, structured long-term research projects that you would never want to do in a nature reserve – but are exactly right for living laboratories in a botanic garden.
If you’d like to know more about the research we’re doing on how the ecological drivers of evolution are being shaped by the ways we work with or abandon plants, please check out some of these recent publications and get in touch.
