A bid will be mounted to rescue a grove of trees at Dunkeld.
The Cathedral Grove was battered by storms earlier this month, felling several massive boles completely and damaging others.
The biggest casualty was a Colorado white fir, while the UK champion Douglas fir situated nearby narrowly escaped.
A large section of a silver-fir came down destroying a section of the fence separating Dunkeld Cathedral with the Dunkeld House Estate. Other casualties include an old larch and one of the largest specimens of the Japanese hiba known in Perthshire.
The site is also home to 10 tree specimens planted as part of the iCONic (Internationally Threatened Conifers in Our Care) project, which escaped unscathed.
Experts in tree collection management will hold a meeting in Dunkeld on January 9 to put together a rescue plan for the two-acre site.
Tom Christian, project officer for the National Tree Collections of Scotland, said: ”Several trees have been blown over completely and others lost tops, which did considerable damage to many neighbouring trees on their way down.
”The result is that the grove is now covered in debris, many standing trees are no longer worth keeping and significant safety concerns have arisen in some of the damaged trees.
”Given the national significance of this iconic site, and the new collaboration between the Dunkeld Hilton and the National Tree Collections of Scotland, it is vital that we do what we can to rescue cathedral grove, clean up the significant debris, address new safety concerns and re-plant a new generation of trees to replace those that have been lost.”
Partners from the National Tree Collections of Scotland including Forestry Commission Scotland and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh will meet with managers at the Dunkeld House Hotel to consider how best to plan and fund the necessary work.
The grove is important to Perthshire’s tourism-friendly tag as Big Tree Country. The Douglas fir with the widest girth in the UK 23 feet stands within cathedral grove, where it is thought to have been placed after being gifted to the Duke of Atholl in about 1846.
Record breaking boles exist across the region, including what is possibly the oldest living thing in Europe the Fortingall Yew Glen Lyon, which is up to 5,000 years old.
At several hundred years old, the Birnam oak sometimes known as Macbeth’s oak stands on the banks of the River Tay near Dunkeld and is said to be the only surviving tree from the Birnam Wood immortalised in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The region’s tall fir trees are also regularly recorded in the record books.
The iCONic project is an attempt to save the world’s fir tree species, around half of which are threatened with extinction in the wild.
Sites including Blair Atholl, Aberfeldy, Dunkeld, Pitlochry, Scone, Gleneagles and Perth have some of the few remaining examples of rare types of conifer in existence.