Gigha Primary School

The Living Garden, hosted by the Garden for Life Forum promotes wildlife friendly gardening. Schools were invited to design a small garden including celebrating the 2017 year of History, Heritage and Archaeology. A mini-me island, Gigha Primary School has designed its whole island in miniature, complete with rocky coast, beaches, buildings and a golf course of cress.

Shells and driftwood

Wind turbine

Local landmarks

Rock buildings

Every garden tells a story about the people who helped make it, the challenges faced, solutions found, lessons learned and the unexpected pleasures along the way. Here is Gigha Primary School’s Pocket Garden Story in their own words:

On Gigha, the North Atlantic Drift means that we enjoy a mild climate and lots of sunshine. We can grow exotic plants and have access to many of these in our world famous Achamore Gardens which are an important part of our history and heritage.

We collected plants ready for potting up so that they are well established for our mini Isle of Gigha garden. Mini King Sago Palms are part of our design because we have lots of palm trees here. We also love to experiment with new foods in our planting and growing and are going to try to grow kiwi fruit, peaches and pineapples. We didn’t have all the plants we needed to create Bailey’s design so we decided to plant lots of vegetable seeds and have a plant swap. That way other people could get the vegetables they needed and we would get the plants for our pocket garden.
We try to reuse as much as possible so we made plant pots out of newspaper. Altogether we swapped 200 plants and people gave us loads more!

Potting up plants

Design ideas

Little seedlings