If your group works in partnership with others across your village, town or city, carrying out horticultural/gardening projects, looking after your local environment and involving the community, we'd love to support, celebrate and give you national recognition through our FREE Beautiful Scotland initiative.

Find out about the support, resources and national recognition available.

**Registration for 2026 will open in mid-late January - get in touch to be added to our contact list.

2026 optional theme – Beautiful Scotland is 60!! and People Power: creating a sustainable future through volunteering

This year, we’ll be celebrating 60 years of the Beautiful Scotland initiative, and hope that all of you will join in the celebrations. We’d especially love to encourage any groups who work in partnership across their village, town or city to give the Beautiful Scotland judged catergory a go, and we think the anniversary is a great reason to give it a try!!! 

As well as using the 60^th diamond anniversary as a theme, we’re tying in with the official theme for the 2026 International Year of Volunteers for Sustainable Development, which is People Power: Creating a Sustainable Future through Volunteering.

As usual, we really look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Background

Beautiful Scotland is a long-established community environmental improvement initiative which we run in partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) under the Britain in Bloom campaign. Beautiful Scotland supports groups across Scotland as they seek to improve and enhance their local environment.

The initiative is for a whole village/town etc. In many cases, one group leads the entry, working in partnership with a wide range of other groups, organisations and the local authority. Beautiful Scotland is based on three pillars – with an extensive set of awards and certificates.

Beautiful Scotland provides the Scottish entrants to the UK & CI Britain in Bloom finals, which is run by the RHS.  The competition takes place between the regional and national winners in 17 areas – Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey and 12 English regions. The regional winners from any given year are entered into the RHS UK & CI Britain in Bloom Finals for the following year.

Scotland has been extremely successful in the UK & CI Finals in recent years, with at least one class winner in every year since 2005. Most impressively, Scottish entrants have won the highest Champion of Champion award four times from 2006-2019, with two successes for the large village of Falkland in Fife, one win for the small town of Alness in the Highlands and a win for Perth.

In its current and previous incarnations, Beautiful Scotland has been running for 60 years. At its launch in 1967, ‘In Bloom’ was run by the then Scottish Tourist Board and supported by the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, and provided a platform for beautification of villages, towns and cities. The initial focus of the campaign was on horticulture, and while that remains a key theme there is now also a focus on environmental responsibility and community participation.

Beautiful Scotland has a sister initiative – which we also run in conjunction with the RHS – called It’s Your Neighbourhood. This is a non-competitive, and is designed to attract volunteer-led community groups who wish to clean and beautify their local neighbourhoods - whether through, for example, community allotments, Friends of Parks groups, after-school clubs, adopting a piece of derelict land.