Events Calendar

Over the last week I’ve been compiling the Gardening Scotland Events Calendar.

The idea is that visitors to the Gardening Scotland website will be able to use it to plan their gardening year, choosing from amongst hundreds of gardening and environment-related events.

Many organisations have still to finalise their plans for 2010, so keep checking back as the Calendar will be updated regularly.

What has astonished me in the course of pulling together all the details is just what wealth of knowledge and expertise is available. Whether you want to find out more about growing vegetables or to perfect your pruning techniques, there’s a workshop available. From snowdrop days to close encounters with butterflies, you can also use the Calendar to find out about great days out and amongst the listings are many that are suitable for children.

It is great to see that the Snowdrop Festival is thriving. From 1 February to 15 March there are dozens of special garden openings across the country where you can enjoy the spectacle of woodlands carpeted in these lovely little flowers. Gardening Scotland show manager Jim Jermyn is a great ‘Galanthophile’ as snowdrop lovers are called and he says that there are many rare snowdrops growing wild in Scotland today that were brought back by soldiers returning from the Crimea.

I’ve had mixed results with snowdrops in my own garden. Mostly they sulk, so I’m going to visit Finlaystone Estate near Langbank in March and buy some of their snowdrops ‘in the green’. Planting snowdrops just as the foliage and flowers are going over guarantees much better results that planting bulbs in the autumn so hopefully I should finally manage to get some established underneath my cherry trees.

Over the festive season however the only gardening I’m planning to do is to curl up in an armchair with a glass of wine and next year’s seed catalogues. So often the secret of gardening lies in timing and I reckon that Christmas and New Year are the perfect time for gardeners everywhere to put their feet up.

Agnes

View the calendar now