One gorgeous day last week we decided to take ourselves off to the lovely mediaeval university town of St Andrews, a favourite place of mine, you can see images of the town here, but first we stopped off at the St Andrews Botanic Garden. Jack had prepared a picnic lunch (he’s not a bad lad) and these two photos are of the view from our picnic bench. The pond was alive with life but luckily none of it was biting.

The bit of land below has been set aside as a wildflower meadow.

There’s also a herb garden and they sell a lot of unusual herbs at the Botanics shop, as well as some very fresh (just dug up) produce from the vegetable garden.

Below is a lily pond.

Below is part of a rockery, alpine garden.

More rockery/scree garden. I must admit that I’m tempted to create a mini rockery in my new garden. Remember they were all the rage in the 1960s? everything comes back around!

I would have to scale it down more than a wee bit, there’s no way I could cope with rocks the size of the ones above.

Last year I and a lot of other people signed a petition to try to keep these gardens open to the public as they were under threat of closure, due to cutbacks I think. You can read about it here. They’ve got a reprieve for the next five years anyway, but given the huge price of land around the town (due mainly to golf) I have no doubt that at some time in the future someone will try to grab it again for building purposes. If so, I’ll be lying down in front of a bulldozer!

I hope you enjoyed your armchair trip to the St Andrews Botanic Garden.