The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Be inspired Head to Gardening Scotland for new ideas
THIS weekend’s Gardening Scotland at the Royal Highland Show Ground near Edinburgh is a must for gardeners. Here we can find new ideas and plants to reboot our gardens.
The show gardens can be inspirational, and demonstrate how so much can be successfully crammed into a postage stamp. Gently curving paths – even a roped bridge used by the Chinese Hillside exhibit – are often used to create the illusion of a larger area.
As ever, the gardens cover several different themes. For me, tranquility and peaceful relaxation, grow your own and the plastics crisis are especially interesting. Research is published almost daily to show the therapeutic and health-giving effect of green in all its shades. The Garden Retreat highlights this and uses the silvery grey Caithness stone as a backdrop. And water can be calming and absorbing, as ‘Living Landscape’ shows.
Sadly, though, the show is all about ornamentals. The satisfaction and health benefits of grow your own get hardly a mention anywhere. Even the RHS ‘Green Walls’ workshops miss a trick by concentrating on ornamentals for a restricted space. Only the traditional square metre garden is on message.
Good on Dundee and Angus College. They illustrate the horrendous damage discarded plastics can do to our oceans. They cleverly use plastic washed up on Scottish beaches to build a thriving coral reef and sunken ship. We’re alerted to the crying need to do something to solve the problem ourselves.
We can contribute as gardeners, and individuals generally, through finding alternatives to plastic, recycling whenever possible, following government initiatives and benefiting from innovative research on algal bioplastic.
Design ideas for the garden are invaluable, but the pull of plants is what the show is mainly about. There’s the widest choice available in one place this weekend.
Specialists can meet fellow enthusiasts on bonsais, begonias, cacti or carnivorous plants or whatever.
But there’s plenty more for lesser mortals like me. Why do I always come home with more plants than I’ve room for?
You’ll find all the popular varieties as well as some hidden gems. Well-established Scottish
nurseries, Macplants, Glendoick Gardens and Kevock Garden Plants are always worth a visit, as are less well-known growers such as CC Plants from Perthshire.
Whenever possible, I like to buy from Scottish nurseries, as they’re likely to sell specimens that are usually hardy enough for our climate. Plants, Shoots and Leaves from Haddington have a wide range of epimediums and persicarias. And I’ll be keen to see their hardy geraniums as they’re one of the few plants my ducks find unpalatable.
My flock would happily crush my irises under web, but I’ll place them in a protected part of the garden and will be sure to visit Holmes Farm Plants from Ayrshire to check out their range. I’ll also have a look at their salvias. I’ve been developing a little fern bed in a wetter more shady spot, so will drop in to Hartside Nursery Garden from Cumbria to see if I can find any suitable hardy ferns. Then there’s that alpine bed, and I’ll always find space for an unusual primula. Hartside are a treasure trove for the more unusual.
But I will have to rove much further south to get replacements for some of my favourite dianthus that succumbed to last year’s winter, even in a sheltered place. So I’ll see what High Park Nursery from Southport and Cornwall’s Calamazag Plant Nursery have to offer.