Scotland Grows is delighted to announce its continued strategic partnership with Scone Palace to support Scone Palace Garden Fair. Entering its third year, the two day extravaganza will take place on 31st May and 1st June 2024 in the historic grounds of Scone Palace, and promises once again, to be an extremely informative, inspiring, and enjoyable day out for gardening enthusiasts and families alike with a fabulous array of plant and garden-inspired exhibitors, a full talks and demonstration programme, the built gardens of the finalists in the Scottish Garden Design Competition, as well as the Scottish Gardeners’ Forum Pallet and Planter Challenge, a new activities area for children, and a delicious range of catering options, all set against the backdrop of the magnificent Scone Palace.
Trellis is thrilled to announce World Therapeutic Horticulture Day will be taking place on 18th May 2024. This global event is in its second year and aims to shine a spotlight on the transformative power of therapeutic horticulture in promoting mental health and well-being, as well as the positive impact it has on the environment.
The goal is to highlight the numerous benefits that therapeutic horticulture can bring to individuals and communities, including stress and pain reduction, improved mood, increased physical activity, and a sense of connection to nature. Look out for activities around this date.
Days of Dahlia, the South Lanarkshire based flower farm and floristry studio, run by mother and daughter team Louisina Currie and Lauren Printy Currie, will fly the flag for sustainable Scottish flower farms at the year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show as they take part in the show’s Floral Design Competition. All the flowers will be grown from seed on the farm, located a short drive from Glasgow and it is hoped that Chelsea will provide them with a platform to communicate to a wider audience about the need to champion local flower farms and sustainable floristry practices which is much kinder for the climate than importing flowers from overseas.
Dobbies has launched Dobbies Community Gardens to offer support for community and charity groups across the country to help transform, restore, or start, local indoor or outdoor green spaces, inviting anyone who has a community space that needs gardening knowledge and inspiration to get in touch.
Each Dobbies’ store will select a project to support from the nominations that are made, with winning groups receiving products, tools, and plants to help bring their community space to life during a personal-shopper session with a dedicated Dobbies’ colleague, and there will be volunteer hours allocated to help bring the project to fruition over the year.
Applications are now open and those entering must be located within 20 miles of a Dobbies’ store. For more information about how to get involved in Dobbies Community Gardens, visit Dobbies Community Gardens.
Scott Galloway, one of our great columnists, is a horticulturist based in Glasgow who is a little obsessed with bergenia, a group of Central and East Asian plants that have been popular in gardens across the UK for about 150 years.
For the last three years, Scott has been researching bergenia in detail and is committed to the conservation and study of the genus. Today, many of these plants are no longer available in cultivation or trade in the UK and are held only by a small number of specialist plant nurseries across Europe.
With rapid changes to our climate affecting how and what we grow across the UK, it is more important than ever to find climate adaptive and resilient plants that can cope with these fluctuating conditions: bergenia has proven itself worthy of this challenge. As alpine plants, the species is well adapted to the challenging conditions of the Himalayas and the mountains of Central and East Asia. They have been grown extensively in Beth Chatto's garden for more than 50 years where they have shown remarkable resilience to hot, dry summers in free draining soil in the south of England and have proven adaptable to the heavy clay soils and consistently wet weather in gardens of the West of Scotland.
To conserve the broadest range of bergenia plants available today, Scott will travel to Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in late April-early May to purchase 33 bergenia cultivars that have either never entered UK cultivation before or have been lost. To ensure their survival and to distribute material to interested growers, he will bring back two of each cultivar, bringing back around 75 plants.
Scott has set up a Go Fund Me page to ask for support to help part-fund some of the costs of this trip and bring more of these wonderful plants to the UK.
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