Gardening in Scotland

The legacy of the Auld Alliance and the beginnings of the grand tour meant that French styles were particularly important in Scotland, although adapted for the Scottish climate.

In the eighteenth century there was a reaction against the "absolutism" and "popery" of the French court and a retreat from the expense of maintaining large formal gardens.

The move to a less formal landscape of parklands and irregular clumps of planting, associated in England with Capability Brown, was dominated in Scotland by his followers, Robert Robinson and Thomas White senior and junior.

[3] Although relatively few early modern gardens have survived unchanged, they can be seen in the maps of Timothy Pont (c. 1565–1614) from the 1590s, which depict abbeys, castles and estate houses surrounded by greenery, earthworks, orchards and arboretums.

[6] The gardens of Aberdour Castle were redeveloped along with the building for the regent James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton (c. 1516–81), perhaps as an area for public display.

[7] Extensive gardens were developed at Pinkie House by Alexander Seton, 1st Earl of Dunfermline (1555–1622), with lawns, fountains, ponds and aviaries, designed for the entertainment of guests.

The best surviving garden from the early seventeenth century is that at Edzell Castle, where, between 1604 and 1610, David Lindsay (1551?–1610) created an enclosure of Renaissance-style walls, adorned with sculptures of the seven Cardinal Virtues, the seven Liberal Arts and the seven Planetary Deities, the expense of which eventually bankrupted him.

[9] The legacy of the Auld Alliance[10] and the beginnings of the grand tour[2] meant that French styles were particularly important in Scotland, although adapted for the Scottish climate.

From the late seventeenth century the gardens at Versailles, with their formal avenues, parterres, and fountains that stressed symmetry and order, were a model.

[11][12] The book borrowed from John Evelyn's (1658) translation of Nicholas de Bonnefon's Le jardinier françois (1651), adapting its ideas for Scottish conditions.

This allowed a focus on significant landscape features such as Bass rock at Balcaskie and Loch Leven Castle at Kinross.

Alexander Edward (1651–1708) continued in the tradition established by Bruce, adding landscapes at houses including Hamilton Palace and Kinnaird castle, Angus.

[2] The Earl of Mar's palace at Alloa was the grandest realisation of the Versailles style gardens in Scotland: it included canals, parterres, statues and ornamental trees.

[14] In the eighteenth century there was a reaction against the "absolutism" and "popery" of the French court and a retreat from the expense of maintaining large formal gardens.

Less symmetrical layouts became common with the development of the "natural" style of the jardin anglais, which attempted to create vistas of a rural idyll.

[10] The antiquarian John Clerk of Pennycuik (1676–1755), one of the key figures in defining elite taste in Scotland, eulogising the estate garden in his poem The Country Seat (1727), which built on the ideas of Alexander Pope.

He created gardens at Mavisbank and Penicuik, Midlothian, with the help of architect William Adam (1689–1748), which combined formality with undulating ground.

[15] The move to a less formal landscape of parklands and irregular clumps of planting, associated in England with Capability Brown (1716–1783), was dominated in Scotland by his followers, Robert Robinson and Thomas White senior and junior.

This resulted in creation of features like Ossian's Hall of Mirrors at the Hermitage Dunkeld and the Hermit's Cave at the Falls of Acharn, which put an emphasis on concealment and the surprise revelation of the natural.

[2] New plants from around the world, often discovered and sampled by Scots such as David Douglas (1799–1834) and John Jeffrey (1826–54), and including the rhododendron and monkey puzzle tree, meant that Victorian and Edwardian gardens were characterised by an eclectic mix of the formal, picturesque, and gardenesque.

By the end of the century the ideas of William Robinson (1838–1935), Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) and the Edinburgh-based Frances Hope (d. 1880), arguing for informal flower-based gardens, had begun to dominate.

In 1978 the BBC began to broadcast The Beechgrove Garden, filmed in Scotland and aimed at the owners of suburban semi-detached houses.