Photo Friday: The Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh, Scotland

One particularly cold, wet and gloomy nearly-but-not-quite-spring day in Edinburgh, my 11 flatmates and myself decided to head to the Royal Botanical Gardens.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] This is Savannah, waving to us as we entered the Gardens.[/caption]

Although a little bit far out of the city centre, walking for half an hour becomes normal if you've been living in Edinburgh for a year. You never quite get over the grey overcast sky, though.

Entering the Botanical Gardens is like entering five different time periods all at once.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] Looks like plants from the age of the dinosaurs.[/caption]



Sometimes we'd stop to pose with flowers.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] Here is Mikayla.[/caption]

There were some landscaped waterfalls in between all the flora.



[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] I call this Rachel's rabbit face.[/caption]

We walked through themed landscape gardens - the Chinese gardens, tundra gardens and even a rock garden.



And we saw the fattest pigeon I'd ever seen.



Climbed up trees.









We came across a whole lot of plants we didn't know the name of.





[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] Sultry Rachel and Rachel's girls - Deborah, Joan, Savannah, Abby and Mikayla.[/caption]



We saw squirrels. SQUIRRELS!

You know that scene in Up where Dug drops everything and goes 'SQUIRREL!'? That was me.







With so many girls having cameras in our hands, I think we became really good at posing for pictures.





After walking through a tonne of gardens of every sort, we entered the greenhouses and stepped into a completely different world - the world in the time of the dinosaurs, back when Scotland was on the equator.







We also walked into rainforests, which was pretty cool (if terribly hot and humid).





And although the Gardens were absolutely lovely and the flowers out in full bloom for spring, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit glad to go home afterwards and say goodbye to the grey gloomy skies.