The Nicholson Institute

Hebridean Celtic Festival Celebration Garden

Our garden is a celebration of our local Hebridean Celtic Festival. We decided to celebrate the festival as it promotes the culture and heritage of our island, through music that we love listening too. We wanted to make a garden that celebrated the fun and excitement that the festival brings to our island every summer.

Instruments ready

A tune to play

Beautiful colours

Our garden is Wildlife friendly, and we have planted wildflowers to attract bees. The wildflowers have been planted to represent the circus and all the bright colours of The Hebridean Celtic Festival. We also used stones to represent the sea and to provide a cool, damp environment for insects to live in.

We have three edible parts in our garden. We planted lettuce to represent the castle green and planted herbs which we made into festival bunting. We also planted potatoes in a drum to represent the music.

We used wooden pallets and recycled pots and instruments in our garden. We also used old sheet music to decorate our garden.

We learned all about planning and designing a garden. We also learned about different plants and how they would grow. We found out how important it was to have a polycrub to grow things in time for May on the island and the weather was not always in our favour! We also found out about the local wildlife and spent time out in the community learning about different plants that grow in our local area.

We were very fortunate to receive a donation of seeds and plant pots from our local garden centre Maybury Gardens. We receive pallets for our garden from Woody’s express. We would like to kindly thank both local businesses for supporting us with our project. We would also like to thank Mrs Macdonald for donating plants to us when we needed more colour added to our garden. Finally, we would like to thank Wendy Henderson from Cove in Bloom and Cove Woodland Trust for mentoring us with our project.

Now that our garden is complete, we are looking for recipes so we can use the things we have grown. We have a garden party in our school to celebrate the end of term so we will let people come and explore our garden. Finally, the bottom pallet will be kept and maintained to encourage wildlife in our sensory garden.

Our pupils worked very hard to develop our pocket garden and managed to complete their SQA National 2 in Science and the Environment based on all the work they have done. We have really enjoyed being part of the project and can’t wait to spend time looking at everyone’s designs!

Garden Design

Creating the garden – from design to reality