Local Heroes - community garden efforts

[Maggi Young]

North Berwick In Bloom - their own website : http://www.nbib.org.uk/

North Berwick is located in East Lothian overlooking the Firth of Forth.  It is a thriving coastal town with a small harbour and excellent sandy beaches, and is a popular holiday destination for seaside day trippers, golfers and nature lovers, and a great place to live.  It overlooks several islands of the Forth - Fidra, The Lamb, Craigleith and the Bass Rock, which host thriving colonies of seabirds.
NBIB logo
NBIB is an enthusiastic group of volunteers working to make North Berwick even more beautiful. RHS Britain in Bloom 2013 Champion of Champions Gold Medal winners - among a long list of other awards for their efforts.
Here are some photos of the work being done by this very successful bunch of volunteers - some of whom may seem rather familiar 


Painter's Cart with pansies and polyanthus


A number of hellebores are flowering in the Stumpery and the Rockery in the Lodge - here is a nice dark one


Working along Coos Green, 2nd last bed cleared of bishops weed & wrack grass


Plenty of snowdrops to be seen in the Glen

There are groups like this in many parts of the country- and SRGC members and other workers for many diverse organisations are as generous with their time for these projects as they are for "our" group and for their own  favourite plant passions.

[Maggi Young]

North Berwick  has  a lovely seaside situation



Eranthis


Galanthus woroowii


Sempervivum sink

Members are welcome to post pictures ans stories of their local projects to improve their town or village etc..... 

[Stan da Prato]

A pleasant  surprise to see NBIB in the forum though given  the range  of topics covered by correspondents community gardening is probably quite  mainstream and certainly an interesting  area to be involved in. NB is only one of many throughout the country and those who currently enter Beautiful Scotland from which some of us progress to represent Scotland in Britain in  Bloom  are listed on the Keep Scotland Beautiful website which has details of how these competitions work. Pitlochry is one that SRGC members will know through the Scottish plant explorers' garden. Both the NB group and Pitlochry started  as local  businesses were concerned about their town's ability to attract visitors. However the scope of the competition  is now much wider and seasonal displays  like hanging baskets are only a part- you need to have  permanent,  sustainable  planting to do well nowadays. The most relevant feature in NB to rock gardeners is the restored Edwardian  rockery- some photos shortly. Southerners looking at the pictures already posted may need a translation  of East Lothian names  for some common weeds- wrack grass is couch Elymus/Agropyron repens while bishops' weed is ground elder Aegopodium podagraria.
 !

[Stan da Prato]

Some photos of the Edwardian  rockery and its restoration. It seems to have been built  as a copy of the McNab rock garden in Edinburgh Botanics which was based on a series of compartments in which different plants could be grown. Though pioneering in its day it was  later  so criticised by Farrer as 'a devil's lapful of stones'  that the Edinburgh authorities demolished it in the early  years of the 20th century and rebuilt  it on more natural lines. The b & w photo is the garden pre 1939 possibly in  the 1920s. Next what it had become a few years ago. NBIB  volunteers then cleared the vegetation and reinstated the stone compartments.

[Stan da Prato]

Once the 100 or so compartments  were ready dwarf bulbs bought at half price in an  end of season sale from a garden centre were planted to give some quick effect. These were easy subjects as the soil is remarkably heavy despite being near the coast. Closer views show various Muscari and Tulipa turkestanica in flower with the later T Red Riding Hood's   striped leaves in front. One problem that later emerged was the presence  of hybrid wild hyacinth bulbs easily  told by their mixed colours in a compartment  with a T. clusiana cultivar. These were later destroyed as we have native hyacinths ( bluebells in the  south) nearby and do not want a hybrid swarm.   Later around 600 plants most from Macplants'  East Lothian nursery were put in one species/variety per compartment. To try to open the ground we used three tonnes of gravel as we planted but conditions still mean  that many alpines  do not thrive especially in winter. Some do and include mossy saxifrages in sun and Brunnera, Omphalodes etc. in the shady end.

[Stan da Prato]

more photos - the plants now fill most compartments  but bulbs still push through in spring or autumn. Their dying leaves do become messy in late spring. We expect at least 10 months when something is in flower - it can be more in mild winters.

[Maggi Young]

Once the 100 or so compartments  were ready......

My word, I'm weak with the thought of all that work - but how good the results are!

[Tim Ingram]

There is an amazing picture of James McNab's compartmented rock garden in Graham Stuart Thomas' - 'The Rock Garden and its Plants'. It looks incredibly fussy and Victorian, but the pictures above show how effective growing plants in compartments in this way can be. It must work very well when comparing between different bulbs in particular - I could imagine a dedicated snowdrop display like this, interspersed with the earliest primroses and crocus of course, but quite a bit of work to maintain as Maggi says. Anything worth doing though...

[Stan da Prato]

Here is a picture  of the McNab rockery kindly passed on by RBGE staff. He constructed all the  different  compartments to be able grow different  plants in a range of composts  -no such luxury at NB but we may experiment with a few compartments  to try to grow things like Dianthus that struggle in the heavy soil. The NB rockery is in the town's main  park the Lodge and is open 24/7 to interested  gardeners, picnickers, people wanting  some fresh air,  dogs and children under varying  degrees of control - that's what community gardening is about  so don't expect a  botanic garden!

[Stan da Prato]

.......another day, another large bag of weeds and prunings. These large bags that gravel comes in are extremely  useful for this task. It does, however, mean  that you need to resist  the temptation to slash the bottom of the bag when the lorry  driver swings  it above where you want the gravel with his crane. Then a look at a bank with naturalised winter aconites and Crocus tommasinianus which is looking  good just now-it is north facing  and a little damp which the Eranthis seem to like.

[Stan da Prato]

not for the purists......but locally our massed Dutch crocus are very popular in the spring  sunshine. One advantage with crocus  is that you can use them in narrow grass verges without the mess of  foliage dying back  as happens with daffodils. We grow lots of daffs  elsewhere. The local rotary club has a programme of gradually  planting  crocus along the verges. We order them wholesale each autumn getting 10,000 corms  at a time. One section   was planted in rows which is not ideal. With planting by East Lothian  council as well as volunteers we reckon  we now have around one million spring bulbs round the town. Smaller groups  of crocus species are in the rockery. All our 80 or so planters have tulips which are not  yet out but the mild winter has allowed violas to keep in bloom all the way through. We find the public like to know the names so we now put labels on these and will add tulip labels later as they flower. Shrubs  like Griselinia or even  golden privet add a bit of height. They then go to permanent beds in summer   when we  put  the cannas we have been overwintering into  the planters. Some planters cannot have added height as they carry notices eg at the railway station.

[Maggi Young]

Crocus  en masse are SO cheerful.
I think those labelled "tricolor" are  C. sieberi atticus, though. There seem to have been quite a lot of these being sold mis-named.

[Stan da Prato]

All information  gratefully received

[Maggi Young]

So many great things being shown in their twitter feed by North Berwick in bloom :

 they've had  cakes for a tulip tea ..... ( can't think why this took my eye  )



and the planters at the railway station are full of bloom

[Maggi Young]

North Berwick in Bloom have had great success in the past for  their pallet gardens - built to the size of a  wooden transit pallet .  This year is no exception:
NBIB  winner in groups section  with GOLD MEDAL no. 8 -  theme: the 17 sports in the 2014 Commonwealth Games. The only snaps available so far is from  the NBIB website.





I can't resist this ......  Bloomin' marvelous result!