Category: Scotland’s Garden Scheme
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Midsummer Melody at Pond Cottage
Make a date – two dates – in August for food and music at Pond Cottage. You are warmly invited to help us celebrate and support CHAS (Children’s Hospices across Scotland) in their £20 million campaign to develop their vital services for families. We are delighted that talented local musician Ola Stanton will be with…
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Debs gets on her bike for charity
Debs Reid cycled through the trees and dismounted by our cottage gate in bright sunshine. She looked remarkably cool for a woman on the latest lap of a 541 kilometre cycle trip from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. Smiling happily, she removed her helmet. “That’s quite a steep run from Bridge of Earn isn’t it?”
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Jurassic glade is a cool but tricky spot
It’s exciting to touch leaves that first evolved so unimaginably long ago. It was a very green world – easy to imagine in our corner of Scotland, but we must plant with care.
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Let’s ring the bells of springtime
Pause for a moment. I started writing this a few weeks ago and the wider world has become even more turbulent. I know there are places where the sky threatens a more deadly deluge than rain. Yet…I go in search of springtime magic and spend most of the walk looking down. The sky is grey, gloomy…
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A gift of hope
Green shoots of hope – I’ve just had a lovely message from a generous man, a rare philanthropist, who is offering to match the money we raise this year for CHAS (Children’s Hospices Across Scotland) through our Scotland’s Gardens Scheme openings. He means it, he was so impressed by what he learned about CHAS when…
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Plants, pollinators, people: welcome to the Pond Garden
How to plan and plant for wildlife in our new climate of uncertainty? I’m searching for ideas in the era of adaptation. There’s great advice from experts but I can also learn a lot from close encounters with the pollinators feasting on self-sown flowers at Pond Cottage. Great opportunists. True survivors.
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Tree stories stir hearts and perhaps a sense of hope
I hadn’t expected to be quite so engrossed. For the next two hours I never once thought about taking my phone out of my pocket
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Every Tree Tells A Story
It begins in Glasgow but Every Tree Tells a Story is an inspiring project that could, should, spread anywhere and eveywhere
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A blossoming welcome to The Pond Garden
After a hard winter it is good to see signs of new life. As climate change blows hot and cold, spring feels both fragile and determined. Winter storms destroyed our oldest wild plum tree. But she has left us a promising legacy.
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Here’s to a new season of unruly gardening
Which season are we in, exactly? Looking through old blogposts it’s almost quaint to note how I marked the comforting rhythm of the four seasons. Four seasons? More like two now I often think: winterish and summerish.
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Standing against the storm
Don’t despair, ‘doomism’ prevents action. Get into the garden. Plan and plant for today and tomorrow. That’s where hope grows. But I can’t keep politics out of mine. In an election year we can put pressure on politicians to get their cross-party act together, finally treating climate crisis with proper urgency.
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Life is just a bowl of bullaces
In other words, we’re a wild garden adapting to the challenges of climate change: – mulching, replanting, learning from plants and wildlife.