Scotland Gardens - Threave

(The second installment of my series on Scottish gardens visited in August, 2005.)

On Thursday morning we went to Threave Gardens, which is an old estate that is now the training ground for the Scottish National Trust gardeners. It was a lovely garden, with lots of exotic plants, some of which were labeled. But a lot weren't, which I found very frustrating. It was the kind of garden that I wished we'd been able to come for a guided tour, as I'm sure I would have learned a lot more with someone there to answer questions. But it was lovely just to walk around, and I got pretty exhausted from hiking over the whole estate.

Giant gunnera leaves near a small pond

Lots of perennial borders.

Due to the harsh climate, you find many walled gardens in Scotland. The stone walls are beautifully crafted.

A paperbark maple and another great flower border.

A naturalistic rockgarden and an arts and crafts garden room.

Not sure what these are.

Hydrangea and phlox

Buddleia and fir cones.

An arboretum, marked by a wooden sculpture of a giant pine cone.

And some natural woodland, leading up to a panoramic view at the top of the hill. (You can see it was pretty cloudy, but didn't start raining until later in the day.)

I noticed a few familiar North American natives among the woodland plants - baneberry and goatsbeard.

I liked this stone sculpture a lot.

This one was interesting, but we weren't quite sure what to make of it.

We signed up for a guided hour of the house, and in retrospect, I think this was something I would have been happy to skip. The tour guide (the lady on the right in the picture below) was very enthusiastic and told me a lot more than I really needed to know about the Scottish family who lived in the house, which was originally built as a hunting lodge in 1872.

Comments

[michael jones]

Scotland Gardens are so beautiful! I have read about them in many gardening guides.