It’s a tie in our first ever virtual garden competition

The votes are in and counted - thank you to everyone who took the time to vote for your favourite judge/assessor garden and thank you to our volunteers for putting their gardens up to the public vote!

This was the first time that we’ve tried a virtual garden competition and we received lots of colourful photos of our volunteer Beautiful Scotland judges and It’s Your Neighbourhood assessors’ gardens. These were then put up in albums on facebook where people could then ‘like’ their favourite in each of the five categories - visit our photo albums on facebook to see all the entries.

And we have two overall top winners!  Colin Ainsworth, one of our longest serving Beautiful Scotland judges and It’s Your Neighbourhood assessors collected the most votes in the ‘Wildlife Friendly Garden’ category and in the ‘Edible Garden’ category.  Liz Stewart, who has been judging for Beautiful Scotland for many years now, collected the most votes in the ‘Fun and Quirky Garden’ category and also in the ‘Mixed Garden’ category…with both getting the same combined top number of votes.  Congratulations to Colin and Liz – we know who to come to if we have any garden questions!

The fifth category – ‘Pots and Hanging Baskets’ was won by assessors, Wendy Suttar and Jim Henderson – double congratulations to the happy couple as they also just got married on Saturday 8 August 😊.

Expert panel announced for our next Gardeners’ Question Time

We’re delighted to announce that the panel for our second virtual Gardeners’ Question Time for our Beautiful Scotland and It’s Your Neighbourhood groups, on Tuesday 25 August, will include two national experts. We’ll be joined by Anthony McCluskey, Chair of the Garden for Life Forum and Project Officer with Butterfly Conservation in Scotland, and Jenny Mollison. Jenny was secretary of the Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society for years and writes a regular column on allotment gardening in The Scotsman. Jenny has her own allotment in Musselburgh, tries to garden organically with wildlife in mind and loves growing heritage vegetables from seed.