Beautiful Scotland
Beautiful Scotland
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 (we have judged and non-judged categories).
Registration for 2024 is now closed, but do drop us an email to express an interest in taking part in 2025.
Find out about the support, resources and national recognition available.
The Beautiful Scotland awards gives us and our community a common goal to work towards, showing we care about where we live, and this national recognition really helps to keep us all motivated throughout the year. We really would encourage any group thinking about entering, either for the first time or following a break, to get involved – the friendly support network, inspiration and motivation it provides is invaluable!
Ray Theedam-Parry, Lauder in Bloom (read Lauder's inspiring journey from It's Your Neighbourhood to Beautiful Scotland).
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.
In 2021 we introduced a non-judged category for any group wanting access to the support, resources and recognition available through Beautiful Scotland, but who don't feel ready to be judged quite yet.
It's FREE to take part in Beautiful Scotland! Your group will benefit from access to support, networking, resources and national recognition from ourselves and from the RHS. Plus, the optional theme for 2024 is Celebration and Cake! Find out more.
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 over 50 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.
