Scone Palace Gardens

The Club was especially pleased to welcome a home-grown speaker to its Zoom meeting: Brian Cunningham, Head Gardener at Scone Palace. Brian grew up in St Andrews and was a pupil at Madras College before his love of gardening took him from an apprenticeship at Craigtoun Park, via the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh and St Andrews’ own Botanic Garden to his present post in 2012.  The ‘Ginger Gairdner’ is, of course, well-known to thousands of Scottish gardeners as a regular contributor to the BBC’s ‘Beechgrove’.

Brian began his talk with the history of Scone, from its place at the heart of Pictdom, through the prominence of Moot Hill as the site of Scottish coronations and the sacking of Scone Abbey during the Reformation, to the present Gothic Palace commissioned by David Murray, the 3^rdEarl of Mansfield.  Brian then turned to the landscape and its designer, John Claudius Loudon, Scotland’s own Capability Brown, who also founded the first periodical devoted solely to horticulture, the ‘Gardener’s Magazine’. The landscaping at Scone, in 1805, involved moving an entire village two miles to the east!

Scone was the birthplace a little earlier, in 1799, of an even more famous botanist, David Douglas, whose plant-hunting expedition to the Pacific North-West of America was one of the great botanical explorations. Among the seeds he brought back and cultivated were those of the tree that bears his name, the majestic Douglas fir. Trees are one of the glories of Scone. Hundreds of thousands were planted by the estate’s first head gardener, William Beattie, to whom Douglas was apprenticed as a boy. Some are even older, including a magnificent sycamore, reputedly planted by King James VI.

Brian’s team of six gardeners is much smaller than Beattie’s was, but, helped by volunteers including local schoolchildren, they are engaged in restoring the walled or ‘kitchen’ garden, which supplies fresh produce for the Palace café, and recreating aspects of Loudon’s landscape. Brian mentioned that each time they plant a new tree they wonder if they may come across the Stone of Destiny: some believe that the actual coronation stone was buried by the monks of Scone to prevent Edward I from stealing it!

Brian’s talk was beautifully illustrated, with photographs of the marvellous rhododendrons that flourish at Scone and of the stunning maze that uses a combination of green and copper beech hedges to form a Star, the Murray family emblem. His enthusiastic listeners then had the opportunity to seek advice about their own gardens before James Murray, in his vote of thanks, said how nice it had been to welcome a St Andrean as speaker.