Why we love Crarae Woodland Garden

Transcript

Four speakers: Derek Shankland (Head Gardener); Phillip (Volunteer); Kirsten Eadie (Assistant Head Gardener); Dilla Patrick (Visitor Services Manager)

Derek
My name is Derek Shankland.  I'm the Head Gardener here at Crarae Garden, which is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland.  
The garden was first started by Lady Grace Campbell in 1912 and it was passed through the Campbell generations.
And then the National Trust for Scotland acquired the garden in 2002, and have been running the garden ever since.

The garden's great for everyone – you don't need to be a plant enthusiast to enjoy the garden.
There's something for everybody: you've got woodland trails; there's a pond with some water features; you've got cracking views down the loch and you've got a really great variety of flora and fauna, so yeah, there's something for everybody.  

I love Crarae because the worldwide plant collection that we have just fits so naturally to the west of Scotland Argyll landscape.
Personally, I love trees. I love the tree collection here – such a wide variety of conifers and broadleaves.
The garden's very lucky to be situated on the banks of Loch Fyne, so we have that coastal influence; it tends to be frost-free in the winter. 
It allows us to grow a wider variety of plants, including those from the southern hemisphere.

Phillip
My name is Phillip. I'm a volunteer here and that involves helping the gardeners out with any specific projects that they've got.
I love the gardens here because I enjoy walking up through the gorge to the top where the flag station is – it gives you an exceptional view. 
That's one of the things that attracted us to come and live here in the first place.

Kirsten
My name is Kirsten. I am the Assistant Head Gardener at Crarae Garden, cared for by the National Trust for Scotland.
Crarae Garden, I think, is really quite unique.
It is a designed landscape but it feels really natural in its setting.
It's a woodland garden mostly – lots of big trees and shrubs – but there's a really good mix of exotic and some native.

I think visitors come to the garden for the walk itself.
Some visitors come because they're rhododendron boffins and they know it's got a really good collection of rhododendrons here.
But I think people just come for the general experience.  
It's quite a serene, immersive experience in the garden.

The gorge that runs through the garden that holds Crarae Burn is a really awesome sight to see, and a lot of the planting that has been done in the garden has been based around the gorge to give that Himalayan feel.
I love Crarae Garden because of the fact that it feels so natural in its setting.
It's a designed landscape but it feels like it's been here forever.
It feels like it's just always meant to be here.

I love the stories that come with the plants – when you see something a bit unusual and you pick up a tag and then we take it back to our database, and we look it up and then we find out the provenance of the plant.
It has maybe been wild collected by somebody like Reginald Farrer or Frank Kingdon Ward.  
And we actually have a piece of that history in our garden!  
It makes you think of the plant collectors of the time and their expeditions, and the stories of the people that come with the garden as well is something that I find really interesting.

Dilla
My name is Dilla Patrick. I am Visitor Services Manager here at Crarae Garden.
I look after the team that look after all the visitors that come to the garden.
We have a café and a shop.
In the café we serve really classic, good coffee and teas.
We do light lunches – we have a range of sandwiches, soups and we have some specials on the board.
We cover all sort of allergies. We have vegan; we have gluten-free options as well.

The garden is very dog-friendly. We allow dogs on a lead in the garden, as well as in the café.
Often when people arrive, they've come through traffic, they've got kids and they come in a little bit stressed and they're 'let's get going'.  
And they come into the garden and they come back, and you can just see all that stress has melted away from them.

I love this place because of the history of the garden.
We have history dating back to 3000 BC with the Neolithic cairn.
We have in the graveyard nearby the ruins of Killevin Church, which was one of the first churches built on the mainland when the monks came off Iona.
It gives you the feeling that there's been people here for such a long time and we're just a brief moment in the bigger picture of this place.
It's a place that calms the soul and makes you feel good about life.