For the past two years, the ‘Small Space Gardens' have proved very successful, laid out on the south lawn during Scone Palace Garden Fair with the Palace providing a stunning backdrop. These ten gardens are the final of a process that begins the previous October, where budding designers ranging from professionals, amateur gardeners, community groups, landscapers, horticultural and garden design students must first submit a design entry based on a theme. For 2025, the theme for the Scottish Garden Design Competition is ‘Hope’.
Our judging panel then has the first difficult challenge of the competition with the hard task of choosing the finalists to participate in the prestigious Scottish Garden Design Competition which, for 2025, will take place on Friday 30th and Saturday 31st May.
With our Walled Garden revival at Scone Palace fully underway, the opportunity to fulfil the Garden Fair organising team's ambition to create a larger ‘Showcase Garden’ category is also being realised from 2025. This is an opportunity for garden designers and landscapers at the top of their game to showcase their abilities not only to over 7000, and growing, members of the Scottish gardening public who attend Scone Palace Garden Fair in late spring each year, but uniquely, these gardens will be taking pride of place in the Walled Garden for a period of nine months!
We believe this presents a window to demonstrate garden design and creation skills more realistically. Visitors to the Fair are potential clients who will be able to see what kind of garden designers are capable of achieving for them for as good as a full year, not just simply over a two-day event window. This will provide a greater challenge to the designer who must consider how the garden will be viewed not only by visitors to the event, but also during the other seasons of the year by the 100,000 visitors who visit Scone Palace annually.
This, we also believe, helps meet the needs of the ‘sustainable’ world in which we must now live, providing greater longevity for the materials and resources used to build these show gardens than what other garden shows may offer.
I must thank Scottish members of The Society of Garden Designers who have been instrumental with these first steps in setting up this category - the way in which we so collaboratively help and support each is just one thing I love about our gardening community here in Scotland.
On that note, we also have renowned garden designer Paul Hervey-Brooks, the winner of too many gold medals for his thoughtful gardens that I have room left to list, as part of the judging panel along with RHS judges Lesley Watson and Dougal Philip, and Lewis Normand, President of The Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society.
Along with the Pallet and Planter Garden Challenge organised by Scotland’s Garden Forum, Scone Palace Garden Fair is now able to offer three levels of garden design and creation. I do hope there is one category, from the fun to the slightly more serious, that tempts your enthusiasm and makes you a part of this two day celebration of Scottish gardening at Scotland’s National Garden Show.
