To all the Ingenious Allotment Gardeners in Scotland

Merlin Trust Report

September 2001

Caitlin O’Brian DeSilvey

Midmar Allotments, Edinburgh.

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To all the Ingenious Allotment Gardeners in Scotland

June: Transplant Coleflowers, Coleworts, Beets, Leeks, Purslain, &c. in moist weather; at least water first the ground if dry. Sow Peas, Radish, Turneep, Letice, Chervil, Cresses, &c. Destroy Snails, Worms, &c. Begin to lay carnations or July-flowers: shade, support and prune such as will blow. Water pots and thirsty plants. Weeding and mowing is in season, and so is distillation. Bees now swarm, look diligently, to them. Garden Dishes and Drinks in season: Cole, Beets, Parsly, Sorrall and other Pot-herbes. Purslain, Letice, and other Sallads. Radish, Scorzonera, Asparargus. Green Peas and Artichoks. Green Gooseberries. Ripe Cherries, Rasps, Currans, Straw-berries.

~John Reid, The Scots Gard’ner, published 1683 Scotland’s June can seem to wind the seasonal clock backwards rather than forwards. At least, that’s how it felt when my three-week tour of Scottish allotment gardens began with a string of bright warm days and ended with a stretch of icy rain. As the nation’s seventeenth-century gardening sage, John Reid, knew, Scotland’s ‘cold, chilled, barren, Rugged-natur’d-ground’ poses a challenge to even the most intrepid cultivator.1 When I planned my tour from the Hawick hills to the Aberdeenshire coast, I hoped to discover allotment gardeners cultivating and preserving plant varieties acclimated to Scotland’s harsh seasons, to record a living heritage of Scottish seed stocks, and to compare these seeds to the northern-acclimated varieties I used at home in the mountains of the American West. These plans were scuppered when, with the notable exception of the potato, I came across little evidence of such deliberate preservation. Most allotment holders ordered their seed from English seed companies, or swapped nameless seedlings with plot neighbors. But I did notice that people were using other tactics to adapt to Scotland’s growing conditions. On every allotment I visited, plotters had developed imaginative techniques to protect and pamper their fruits and vegetables. Reid dedicated The Scot’s Gard’ner (first published in 1683) ‘To all the ‘Ingenious Planters in Scotland’. In this report, I introduce the reader to the descendents of Reid’s ‘ingenious planters’. Reid wrote his book because, ‘the many Books on Gard’nery are for other Countries and Climates, and many things in them more speculative than practical.’ His tips encourage gardeners to find novel uses for common materials: drinking glasses cover tender melon plants; pond and ditch scourings enrich compost piles; a piece of woolen cloth wicks water to thirsty plants.2 The Scottish gardeners I met would recognize this resourceful, scavenging instinct. Discarded objects regularly find new uses in sheds and beds. Combined with this frugal creativity is a joy in experimentation, in pushing the boundaries of the possible⎯bonsai and fig trees flourish in ramshackle greenhouses, globe artichokes fruit next to giant Kelsey onions. Reid and the gardeners I met share a spirit of inventive adventure, and they also share a conviction that keeps them at work, season after season: ‘The Kitchen-Garden’ wrote Reid, ‘is the best of all Gardens’.3 It seems only appropriate to invite Reid (and his erratic seventeenth-century spelling) along on this journey. Setting out in Stirling: Of Cabbages and Kings

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It’s not entirely true that my tour began in the sun. A black cloud began to toss down drops as I crossed over the River Forth footbridge. I hurried under the railway line to a strip of floodplain land crowded with huts and fences. Entering the allotments, I could see James IV’s restored Great Hall glowing on the castle hill. To the north, the Wallace Monument threatened to pierce the heavy sky. John Petrie greeted me from his plot. ‘Looks like you brought the rain with you’. As the downpour drenched the earth, we sheltered in John’s car to look at computer printout of his plot plan. The list of crops that John grew would become familiar to me over the next few weeks. Cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower. Shallots, onions, leeks. Beet root, carrots, Swedes, parsnips (the ‘small seeds’). Peas and broad beans. A few rhubarb plants. A good fraction of potatoes. These sturdy crops, I would learn, are the staples of the Scottish allotment. A traditional plot produces these vegetables in precise rows, on a strict ‘field’ rotation regime. There is something faintly military about a landscape made up of such identical patchwork plots—each sprout at attention, upright and obedient. But a closer look usually reveals the odd experiment, tucked in behind the tattie patch (John tended kohlrabi and calabrese trials). These traditional plots embody the essence of adaptation to Scottish conditions. Potatoes and root crops thrive in the cool summers, producing reliable stores for long winters. If I dwell on variety and innovation in the rest of this report, it is not without an appreciation for the old-school plotters. John’s Stirling patch became my template for the ‘classic plot’—and I would see hundreds more during my allotment travels.

Bridgehaugh Allotments, Stirling. 9 June. John Petrie’s Duke of York early potatoes mature below the castle walls.

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Hawick to High Carntyne: Enclosing

As there is no Countrey can have more need of planting than this, so non more needful of Inclosing: for we well know how vain it is to plant unless we Inclose.4

The day after my Stirling visit, I drove south to the Borders under blue skies. Traces of the foot and mouth scare lingered in the countryside. In ‘Hawick in the Hills’, the weekend’s Common Riding celebration was restricted to a trot down the bunting-clad high street. Fred Munro greeted me at his door. A short walk took us past Fred’s terraced home garden plots and a melancholy overgrown allotment site. ‘Interest in allotments has dwindled over the years’, Fred explained. When the hosiery and tweed industry was in full production in the valley, employees tended hundreds of plots up on the hilltops above the town. At Langdale, Fred’s site up the road, plotters now occupy only two thirds of the plots. Langdale—exposed and windy—abounds in greenhouses and sheltering hedges. John Reid would approve of the ‘inclosing’ that has happened here. Oliver, a plot holder for thirty-eight years, keeps one greenhouse for tomatoes and one for trailing petunias and other flowers. In a large glasshouse up the path, a mature grapevine crowded against the panes as if was trying to escape. A newer poly-sheeted structure housed a homegrown hydroponic arrangement of tomato plants set in wick-fed gro-bags. Fred opted for the less flashy ‘washtub and bucket’ tomato planters.

As Fred as I wandered the allotments, I tried to imagine the site fully-occupied, busy

A wick carries fortified water from the buckets to the roots of the Sweet Million tomato plants in one elaborate Hawick greenhouse system. In another, washtubs and buckets serve the Mini-beefsteak and the Moneymaker plants just as well.

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with people earthing up their potatoes and tending their budgies (once a common auxiliary allotment hobby in Hawick). But the pastures seemed to be reclaiming the plots one by one; wildflowers and grasses grew up inside gap-roofed greenhouses and shaggy hedges. Many of the remaining plotholders counted their tenure on the plots in decades. I rode back north musing about an adopt-a-plot schemes to connect people on Edinburgh’s lengthy waiting list with empty plots in the Hawick hills (‘Fertile plot with greenhouse, historic shed, and a country view! Yours for a £4 a year!’).

Later in the week, a rainy-day visit to Glasgow gave me a flavor of the intimate industry on a fully-occupied (and also well-enclosed) allotment site. The High Carntyne allotments are tucked between a motorway and a bingo palace, in a low-lying bit of ground. From the far side of the fence on a wet day, they appeared as rickety rows of sheds interspersed with patches of damp earth. Wisps of stove-pipe smoke tattered in the steady rain. George met me at the gate and led me to John’s compound, where Joyce (a young woman who has inherited her father’s plot) joined us for a chat and a cup of tea. The four of us sat in John’s greenhouse for over an hour among the tomatoes and the melons. A bright gray light filtered through the glass; a wood stove in the corner warmed hot water for the ‘central heating’.

Langdale Allotments, Hawick. The greenhouse houses a venerable grape vine.

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When we ventured out from our snug spot into the rain, I appreciated the value of

enclosure from a human, as well as a horticultural, perspective. In fact, at High Carntyne, allotment holders seem to treat their sheds and greenhouses as extensions of their homes. In one shed, two gardeners lounged on battered armchairs around a potbelly stove while the weeds battled the potato plants outside. The owner of this shed described himself as an ‘urban beachcomber’. The grapevine in his greenhouse didn’t seem to mind sharing its home with a battered boat. Other allotment holders took a more functional approach to their beachcombing (and their gardening). Most greenhouses were fitted out with stoves made from old gas canisters. George had just assembled a new greenhouse out of discarded window frames. My hosts entertained me with stories of their scavenging exploits: the local furniture shop that supplies scrap wood for the fires; the manure from the police stables; the windows from the double-glazing estate renovations. I rode away from High Carntyne warmed by tea and company, George’s directions to his favorite charity shop rattling in my head. Hamilton Hill: Mixing and Stirring Vandals burned George’s greenhouse to the ground at High

Carntyne allotments in Glasgow. George scavenged windows and trained his tough clematis out of the ashes up the new structure.

On damp days, High Carntyne allotment holders shelter in their greenhouses, where discarded gas tanks find new life as wood-burning stoves. The radiator behind John (above left) circulates hot water.

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… nimbly break and chop all the clods thoroughly; this is very material as well as the thorough mixing of the manures with the soil; So that mixing, stirring, restirring, fallowing is most pertinent for the cold, chilled, barren, Rugged-natur’d-ground in Scotland all which softens and tenders it, and so fits it for nourishing good feed and plants, as I can tell by experience, therefore.5

On the day I visited Hamilton Hill allotments, there was plenty of ‘mixing, stirring, and restirring’ going on. Hamilton Hill occupies a narrow site on a windy ridge above Glasgow, the plots strung along under a power line, between a canal and a housing estate. A few years ago these allotments were all but abandoned, only a few older plotters holding on. Since then, a community project led by Danny Lowe has revived the site. Projects reach out to youth, drug treatment programs, and social inclusion partnerships. The social mixing is evident on the plots in quirky methods, colorful murals, and the variety of people. I turned a flowerbed with Dan, a local resident who finds work at the gardens more satisfying than hard-to-come-by wage labour. In the community plots, Danny and I set sweet corn into a crescent-shaped raised-bed while he told me about their worm composting and taught me local names for the weeds. ‘Nettie’s hair net’ for chickweed, and ‘sheep’s socks’ for lamb’s quarters. As we worked, an adjacent plotter disappeared into a hole at least four feet deep, triple (or quadruple) digging his beds. Danny explained that the gardener—a vegan—was opposed to using animal manure in his soil and hoped to achieve similar benefits with intensive cultivation. John, a more traditional sort, welcomed the new blood on the allotments, though he still turns his onion and potato ground with the trench cultivation method. Worms, double-digging, raised beds, field systems—all of the methods used at Hamilton Hill appeared to be equally successful at ‘softening and tendering’ the rugged-natured Scottish ground (and perhaps its people).

Hamilton Hill, Glasgow. Dan digs over a flowerbed at the entrance to the allotments (r). Curved raised beds produce food for the community groups who help tend them (l). Beyond these beds the bent back of a keen allotment holder is just visible as he triple-digs his beds to rid them of stones and other obstructions.

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Patterson Park: A Shower of Small Rain

In watering plants, use not well-water, especially for tender plants, neither Rivers that run long and quick on sharp gravel... Water no plants with standing, stinking, Ditch-water, nor no Water that stinketh: Rainwater and large pond-water is excellent, but keep it not too long...so the larger your pondes or Rivers be, and the opener to the Sun and Air, and the more moving by horsse, geese, and ducks their Sweeming, the sweeter it will be… When you water beds of small seeds with the watering pot, shake it nimbly, that it may fall like a showre of smal rain. I have often made use of a handful of small Straw or Hay drawen as thatch, tyed in the middle, and at one end poured water with a Cup, and shaked the same that it appeared like a gentle bedewing rather than a glutting rain.6

The Yoker-Renfrew ferry used to shuttle workers to their jobs at the shipyards either side of the Clyde downstream from Glasgow. On a Wednesday morning in June, traffic was notably thin. I stood on the Yoker side admiring the foxglove in the riverbank, waiting for the pilot to notice me and my bicycle. Eventually, the Renfrew Rose nosed in to the bank and I boarded for the short trip. On the other side, one of the allotment holders found me looking confused on the street and led me into Renfrew’s Paterson Park allotments. We met Bert Cook, the President of the Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society and the ringleader of the Patterson Park crowd, near the fishpond at the entrance. Tea and sandwiches waited at the far end of the orderly site in Tom’s well-equipped shed. We sat around Tom’s table (hewn out of a tree that used to grow on the grounds of a nearby hospital) and talked. Our conversation seemed to eddy around water: how to get rid of it, how to find it, how to bring it to the plants. Patterson Park is in the Clyde River floodplain. Every spring during the March

The Renfrew Rose, Clyde River passenger ferry.

Bert Cook, Gavin Blackwood, Eddie Docherty, Tom Barr, and Tom McMurray pose with tea and sandwiches at Patterson Park, Renfrew.

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neap tide the water rises well above Wellington level. One year, an old allotmenter who had been sleeping in his shed woke to find his cat floating away on a cushion. When the floodwaters subside, the gardeners hurry to prepare the soil and get their seeds in the ground so they can harvest a reasonable crop before the floods return in September. Which makes it all the more impressive, they pointed out, that one of their allotment holders—Eddie Docherty—won last year’s Garden News ‘Gardener of the Year’ award. Eddie smiled into his tea cup. Once the dry days of May arrive, gardeners have a few source options for their water needs. Many of the plots are fitted with wells and small pumps that tap into a constant subterranean flow. Others rely on rainwater, collected through elaborate gutter systems into fifty-five gallon barrels. ‘If a man can’t figure how to get a barrel for free he shouldn’t have an allotment’, decreed Bert. If all else fails, there is always tapwater. These gardeners never have to use water that ‘stinketh’ (the water in the fishpond stays with the fish). Tom created a special nozzle for his watering can to give hard-to-reach plants a ‘gentle bedewing’ when they need it. Over a pub lunch at the Ferry Inn (we could see the Renfrew Rose out the window), Bert, Tom, and Gavin told me that the giant Braehead shopping center just upriver has expansion plans. The Electricity Board owns the land, but they won’t promise the allotment holders any security. Gavin called the allotments ‘a community within a community’; they all wondered how the people (and the wildlife) will survive if the plots are lost. The land—wedged between two power sub-stations in the floodplain—is hardly prime real estate. The allotment holders have created a vibrant landscape out of a patch of earth that no one else wanted. I only hope they are able to keep it.

Tom McMurray demonstrates the watering system at Patterson Park in Renfrew. Many plots have individuals wells like the one above, but Tom takes his watering one length further.

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Rothesay: Fishboxes and Toilet Bowls

Great varieties may be raised from seeds sowen in Pots, the soil aforesaid mixt with willow earth in October, take head of deep interring bairs ears, sow them as purslain; set the Potts and cases with them at the Southside of a Wall till Aprile, at which time they spring.7

The ferry that carried me to the Isle of Bute was about twenty times larger than the Renfrew Rose. Fortunately, its reserves of hospitality matched its size. On the way to Glasgow’s Central Station to catch the train to the Wemyss Bay ferry, my bicycle chain had snapped. I managed to catch the train, but as the ferry drew in to Rothesay, I wondered where I would find an open bike shop on a Saturday evening. The man standing next to me asked, ‘You on holiday?’, with a glance at my pack. ‘Well, not exactly’, I said. I explained my mission, and my predicament. The next morning my ferry friend met me at the pier with his tools. The repaired chain held for a cycle over the island, punctuated with stops to view abandoned stately gardens and to eat ice cream. Back in Rothesay, I met allotment holder Billy Sproul at his cottage. At the allotments, a cluster of gardeners gathered around the gate. Billy stopped to

talk, and I introduced myself to a young couple who described themselves as committed organic growers. The Rothesay plots are set at the edge of a public park, over the fence from an old slaughterhouse. In the past, Billy explained, allotment holders carted over the manure and the offal to turn into their plots. The scene on the allotments is slightly more refined these days, with Billy painting pictures in his shed and growing show-quality gladiolas and chrysanthemums. As I visited with other gardeners in their plots, I noticed a greater than average concentration of containers. Irene grew her turnips and carrots in castaway metal tubs to fool the flea beetles and the carrot flies. Alec used old fish boxes to start his plants, claiming the styrofoam holds the heat against the roots and encourages faster growth. The names on the boxes detailed the geography of the Western Isles. Alec also grew his celery and parsnips in sleeves made of old plastic pipe. It seemed as though any unwanted material in Rothesay found its way to Alec’s allotment, including old doors, toilet bowls, and lawn ornaments.

At Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, allotment holders glean their containers off the fishing industry.

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Alec spent ‘donkeys years’ as a travelling gardener on Bute, a few of them at the

Rothesay municipal greenhouses at Ardencraig. ‘Have you seen the Ardencraig greenhouses?’ he asked. ‘No’, I admitted. ‘Oh, you must do’. So we climbed into his blue van (the back loaded with bits of wood and metal) and drove through town, dodging the Rothesay Regatta crowds and the children milling around for the fancy dress parade. At Ardencraig, the mango-bright Victorian greenhouses and the robust flowering annuals combined in a brilliant clash of colour—a visual din of fuschia and orange, crimson and daffodil-yellow. That evening, as the ferry pulled away from the harbour, I imagined I could see the gardens glowing on the hill.

Rothesay gardeners’ fondness for whimsy is balanced by their skill in traditional cropping methods—like the old-fashioned runner bean fence.

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Dundee: Defensive Gardening

Place Cow-hooves for the woodlice, and erwigs to lodg in all night, and so scald them early morning...Dash Water on the Trees for Caterpillers, by the Stroups we get from Holland. Gather Snails and Wormes, shoot Crows, Pyes, Jayes, and spread Nets before your Wall-Fruit for their preservation.8

Clepington Working Men’s Gardens, in the shadow of the Dundee United football

stadium, is one of the oldest operating allotment sites in Scotland. Allotment holders trace their tenure back to 1864, when a local landowner placed the land in trust for a self-help association. The plotholders continue to be an independent lot. They recently raised the funds for a new community hut, and their association is completely self-supporting with annual plot fees. Antony Roncone, a twenty-five year allotment holder, toured the site with me, pointing out plots of show gardeners and prize winners. There was a tidy aesthetic in the plots, with every available space planted or potted (including the verticals). As we walked about, I noticed impressive efforts to protect crops from the ever-present pigeons and pests. I had come across netting, screens, and container-planting at other sites, but Dundee’s plots seemed particularly well-defended—perhaps because many of the plot holders want to achieve the cosmetic perfection

Defensive gardening at Clepington Working Men’s Gardens, Dundee.

Roses and other flowers attract beneficial insects and brighten the rows of sheds at Clepington.

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that will win them prizes in horticultural shows. Compact disc strings dangled over tender brassica plants, wire shopping baskets shielded lettuces, and elaborate structures guarded ranks of giant leeks. Antony explained that show gardeners sow their carrots in barrels in February in a special mixture of compost and sand so the roots will grow straight and fat out of reach of the low-flying carrot fly. Inside the Clepington greenhouses, the plants tended to the exotic: cacti and bonsai shared space with the more common tomato. Across town at Old Craigie Road, the methods and the crops were similar, although the atmosphere was more relaxed. At these allotments it was difficult to determine whether more energy was going into keeping away pests or people. The paths,

hemmed in by the backsides of sheds and greenhouses, presented an unwelcoming aspect for potential vandals (with some creative decoration relieving the blank walls). But when my host Alistair Bain propped a ladder against his shed so that I could take some aerial photographs from his roof, I saw the site in its gritty glory—a horticultural shanty-town of makeshift sheds and productive plots.

Old Craigie Road, Dundee. Protective nets and screens keep the birds at bay.

CD scare tactics at Clepington, Dundee.

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Thornhill: Careful Composting

For preparing my composts, I use a pit (wherin sometimes I make a hot-bed) oblong, about 4 foot deep of length and breadth, as I can get dungs, Vegetables, and soils to fill it: here to lay all Kindes or sorts with Stratums of earth, as horse, neat, Sheep, Pigeons, and Poultrie dung, ferns, weeds, leaves, soot, ashes, sticks, saw-dust, feathers, hair, horns, bones, urine, scouring of ponds, ditches, blood, pickle, brine, sea-water, the cleaning of House and Office, &c.9

The Thornhill village allotment site was the smallest and the neatest set of plots I visited. Even the compost piles were visions of tidiness, each leaf and blade of grass in its place. The plots are at the edge of the village on land owned by the Buccleuch Estates. In fact, estate owns most of the land in the area, and a good number of the Thornhill allotment holders are current or former estate employees. This may explain the meticulous edging on the grass allotment plots⎯a skill employees practiced in their work restoring and maintaining the elaborate formal gardens at Drumlanrig Castle. I was lucky to have as my guide a man who has been an estate ranger and gardener for thirty-seven years. After a stop by the allotments, we drove around the estate in Bert’s van. He brought me up to the overlook for a view of the castle, on a

walk through the wood to see the one of the oldest Douglas fir trees in Britain (planted in 1832 with a seed seed brought back from America by botanist David Douglas), and to look at the immense walled garden that once supplied the estate with tropical fruits in mid-winter. Underground chimneys used to carry the smoke from the greenhouses up through the hill to escape away from the low valley. We also stopped by Dabton House, home of the Earl of Dalkeith, where the head gardener gave us a tour of his kitchen garden and greenhouses. Many of the methods were familiar to me from allotment experience (the peas growing up their sticks, the flowers edging the vegetable plots), though everything was on a slightly grander scale. Potato Lore

Potatoes being cut in as many pieces as you please, providing there be an eye at each

Composting at Thornhill village.

Several of the Thornhill village allotment holders apply the edging skills they practiced as staff at the Drumlanrig Castle gardens to the upkeep of the grass paths between their neat plots.

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piece and planted in March, five rows in the bed, plant not deep, neither in wet or stiff ground.10

If there is a ubiquitous Scottish allotment crop, it has to be the potato (the ‘tattie’). Easy to grow, satisfying to harvest, and, of course, often destined to become one-half of a plate of fish and chips. Scottish allotment holders may have a difficult time recalling which variety of cabbage they are growing, but every one I met could rattle off the list of potato varieties they had in ground—from first earlies through to the main crop. I ended up doing an informal survey of popular varieties. Across the country, Kerr’s Pinks and the Duke of York varieties emerged as the front-runners. Both are traditional Scottish-bred tubers developed around the turn of the last century. Homeguard and Desiree were newer varieties with a faithful following. I did notice some regional loyalties. South-central gardeners tended to plant Pentland Squire and Javelin; Rothesay gardeners grew Arran Pilot and the Arran Victory, which were developed just across the Sound of Bute; and, in the northeast, Cara and Catriona were local favorites. Something about potato cultivation encourages fanaticism. A friend on an Edinburgh allotment grows forty different varieties, many of them from heirloom stock provided by the Henry Doubleday Research Association. She carefully notes the results from each harvest, coding them for future reference as to their ideal fate—salad, baking, mash, or chips. In Aberdeen, even the crows are mad about spuds, clawing away at the edges of the drills to get at the tender new potatoes. Aberdeen allotment holders insisted that this was normal behavior, but gardeners in the rest of Scotland denied that they had ever witnessed such aggressive tactics in their plots.

Jerry at High Carntyne allotments in Glasgow harvests his early potatoes on June 15. He planted into a cold frame in February. Sweet corn seedlings shelter in the frame behind the potato plants.

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The Pleasure Garden: Herbs and Flowers

Pleasure-gardens useth to be divided into walkes and plots, with a Bordure around each plot…and planted with a variety of Fine Flowers orderly Intermixt, Weeded, Mow’ed Rolled, and kept all clean and handsome.11

Scottish allotment gardeners are doing their part to carry on the tradition of horticultural ingenuity first celebrated by John Reid. Their dedication, however, does not end with their edible crops. In this section, I trace a broad sweep from Aberdeen back to Glasgow, visiting with people who think flowers are just as essential as vegetables—and may even be more effective at lifting summer spirits so they can survive the winter darkness. Most of the gardeners I met grew some flowers: a clump of sturdy lupin, or a plot of self-seeding poppies. A few do much more. Terry Stott keeps four Aberdeen plots full of show flowers—the hardy annuals, the half-hard annuals, and the perennials. The chrysanthemums shelter from the rain under a special frame. He travels to shows all over Scotland with the best specimens from the immaculate, weed-free rows. After I left Terry, I road my bicycle down the coast to Newtonhill, where one

‘pleasure garden’ plot amazed me with its variety and color—though the view over the North Sea added to the effect. The Newtonhill plots are relatively new, established by the town and a group of interested residents ten years ago. Jan, my guide, tends a charming chaos of herbs and flowers in her plot. Later in the week, at the Perth allotments, I met a woman with a glorious honeysuckle

Terry Stott in his plot of show flowers in Aberdeen.

Newtonhill Allotments and the North Sea. .

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bower gracing the entrance to her flower-full allotment. Barbel Roerig’s garden is a place for sitting and thinking as much as for hoeing and harvesting, with benches tucked behind banks of berries and a hut with an oven and a sewing machine. The Perth allotments, on Moncrieffe Island in the River Tay, can be reached only by a narrow footbridge along the railway. Many of the gardeners at the site use their plots as a retreat, and perhaps because of this flowers abounded⎯roses and fuschias, delphinium and poppies, dahlias and Livingston daisies. As I rode the train home that day through Stirling I thought about the beginning of my trip and the keen flower gardeners in the Stirling plots. The Drummonds kept two plots⎯one for flowers and one for veg. On the day of my visit Nikki was planting out the annual flowers, most of which were destined to be given away in bouquets. ‘Allotments have been part of my whole life’, she said, ‘and I just do it for the enjoyment’.

Nikki Drummond plants out annual flowers in Stirling, while her poppies bloom along the borders with the Wallace Monument in the misty background.

Barbel Roerig under her honeysuckle bower, Perth Allotments, Moncrieffe Island.

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In Glasgow, I came across a few sites where the flowers and the herbs seemed to be at least as important as the vegetables, bursting out of confinement in the border to take center stage. The Kelvinside allotments⎯Kirklea and Julian⎯contain a dense diversity of perennials and annuals. At Julian, a dark purple (almost black) columbine caught my eye, having seeded itself opportunistically around the site. A giant lovage plant towered over my host at the Julian allotments, threatening to consume the plot that it resided in. The high proportion of blooms at New Victoria Gardens, on the other side of town, is partly due to the clause in the missive of let requiring gardeners to devote one-quarter of their area to flowers. This curious regulation is an artefact of the site’s origins in the late nineteenth-century urban beautification and self-help movements. The philanthropists who established sites like New Victoria thought that

‘Black’ columbine and foxglove at Julian Allotments, Glasgow. Gerry Loose next to a giant lovage, Kirklea, Glasgow.

New Victoria Gardens, Glasgow. The green door guards rows of secret gardens.

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an appreciation of horticultural beauty would improve the moral fibre of the gardeners. Twenty-first century gardeners don’t seem to mind the regulation, and some of them have been inspired to invert the formula, setting aside only one quarter of their plot for vegetable cultivation. Andy, one New Victoria gardener, grows dozens of different varieties of annual flowers, all started in his two greenhouses on the plot. He was particularly proud of his ‘Lord Bute’ pelargonium, a lovely deep crimson flower bred at Stuart House on the Isle of Bute.

A New Victoria Gardens, Glasgow, allotment gardener with his ‘Lord Bute’ pelargonium.

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Back to Edinburgh At the end of June, I returned to Edinburgh and my own neglected allotment plot in Portobello, where the weeds were busy smothering the carrots and the peas were bursting their pods. I also returned to work on my thesis—an historical geography of Edinburgh’s allotment gardens. When I set out on my trip in June I had already spent months studying and visiting Edinburgh’s allotments, but my journey around Scotland gave me a different perspective on these jumbled, often joyful, places. I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to visit with people in their private, leafy worlds; to talk with them about something they love; to drink their tea and admire their plants. I can’t imagine a more interesting way to get under the skin of a place than to meet its gardeners and to hear them describe it soils, seasons, and symbols. I now know Scotland from inside its allotment plots, and from the time I shared with its ingenious planters. 1 All references, The Scot’s Gardener, John Reid (1683). Reprinted 1988, Mainstream, Edinburgh. Page 67. 2 Page 67 3 Page 22 4 Page 83. 5 Page 67 6 Page 72-73. 7 Page 113. 8 Page 95. 9 Page 69. 10 Page 107. 11 Page 26.

Multi-functional allotment plot with tractor. Musselburgh.

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Scottish Allotment Sites Visited: 9 June 2001-28 June 2001 Stirling, Bridgehaugh Bridge of Allan Hawick, Langdale Dumfries

Kingholm Noblehill

Stoop Thornhill Glasgow

Hamilton Hill High Carntyne. Kirklea Julian New Victoria Gardens

Rothesay Renfrew, Patterson Park Aberdeen Newtonhill Dundee

Clepington Working Mens’ Gardens Old Craigie Road Magdalen Green City Road

Perth Musselburgh Livingston

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Index of Illustrations Page Image

Title Midmar Allotments, Edinburgh. 23 June.

2 Stirling Allotments, Bridgehaugh. Castle and plots; John Petrie. 9 June.

3 Hawick Allotments, Langdale. Tomato growing methods. 10 June.

4 Hawick Allotments, Langdale. View from the hill. 10 June.

5 High Carntyne Allotments, Glasgow. Allotments holders in their

greenhouses; re-built greenhouse with clematis. 15 June.

6 Hamilton Hill Allotments, Glasgow. 14 June.

7 Yoker-Renfrew Ferry; Group of gardeners at Patterson Park Allotments, Renfrew. 20 June.

8 Tom McMurray demonstrating watering techniques. Patterson Park Allotments, Renfrew. 20 June.

9 Container gardening at the Rothesay Allotments. 17 June.

10 More containers and runner bean fences, Rothesay Allotments. 17 June.

11 Clepinton Working Men’s Gardens, Dundee. 27 June.

12

CDs and brassicas, Clepington; Old Craigie Road, Dundee. 27 June.

13

Thornhill village allotments and Drumlanrig gardens. 11 June.

14

Early potato harvest at High Carntyne, Glasgow. 15 June.

15

Terry Stott, Aberdeen Allotments. 25 June; Newtonhill. 25 June.

16

Barbel Roerig under her honeysuckle bower, Perth. 28 June; Nikki Drummond plants out annuals, Stirling. 9 June.

17

Kelvinside Allotments, Julian and Kirklea, 14 June. New Victoria Gardens, Glasgow. 20 June.

18

Andy with his Lord Bute Pelargonium, New Victoria Gardens. 20 June.

19

‘No golf’, Musselburgh Allotments. 22 July.