Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland

Posted on 1 May 2024 by Katrina

Last week we drove to Perth to visit Branklyn Garden again, it’s a lovely National Trust for Scotland location.

It was a lovely warm (ish) sunny (ish) day, well it didn’t rain, and the rhododendrons were looking their best.

This garden was donated by John and Dorothy Renton, a couple who had designed the two acre hillside garden after building their house on the plot in 1922.

In the photo below you can just see the house which I think is privately rented now. There is a cafe of course, with a ‘sitooterie’ where you can have your coffee and cake at a table outside .

This place is well worth a visit if you like gardens and plants, photographs never do the place justice. They also have a lot of plants for sale, many of which have been propagated from plants in the garden. That’s very unusual, most places just buy plants in from somewhere, which just isn’t the same at all.

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland – part 1

Posted on 11 June 2021 by Katrina

Earlier this week we visited Branklyn Garden in Perth which is a smallish garden, just two acres, which is owned by the Scottish National Trust. It’s a lovely place and has some gorgeous plants, it’s especially scenic at this time of the year with all the acers, rhododendrons, azaleas and Himalayan poppies in flower at the moment.

There are some wee winding paths through the acers/Japanese maples, but there are wider paths too.

The orange coloured flowers are particularly striking. I think these are azaleas rather than rhododendrons.

But the primulas and meconopsis are putiing on a great display at the moment too.

I think you’ll agree that the acer below is contributing a lot of colour too, with it’s zingy citrus shade and the red of its seed pods.

This garden is like a slice of heaven, the only thing which mars it is the sound of traffic from the nearby road below it. Obviously when the original owners of the garden built their house and garden in this location the traffic was a lot lighter.

There is a small stream which runs through part of the garden, but I’ll leave the photos of that to another post. It was just so lovely to get out and about and do something quite normal but certainly different from sitting at home as we have had to do for so long, and it felt safe.

River Tay, Perth, Scotland

Posted on 10 November 2020 by Katrina

For obvious reasons our travelling this year has been very much curtailed, but I’ve been coping well with having to keep within the guidelines for travelling around, even when we were only allowed out for an hour a day for exercise, and to go to the supermarket. But it looks like we in Fife will have to stick to our own county again soon as Covid stats rise again. So last Thursday we drove to Perth in the neighbouring county, just for a change – and while we could. I wasn’t interested in the shops – well – apart from the Oxfam bookshop, but the River Tay is right at the top of the High Street so we went to have a look at it. Unfortunately as you can see from the photos below we were a week or two too late for the best of the autumn colour.

There’s a nice old bridge over the river.

And a not quite so nice more modern bridge.

With my back to the river I took a few steps forward to take the photo below. The river is perilously close to the shops and the town has flooded in the past but I think they’ve solved that problem, for now anyway. I love towns with a river running through them, as all the old places do. The building on the left below with all the flags hanging from it is now the Perth County Council Headquarters. I really like that they are inclusive and happily fly the flags of so many other countries instead of just a Union Jack/flag or Saltire/St Andrews flag.

You can see some great images of Perth here.

Yes I DID buy a couple of books in the Oxfam bookshop, but I’ll keep those for another time.

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland – part 2

Posted on 10 July 2020 by Katrina

Here we are back at Branklyn Garden in Perth again, it was the first day of its opening again after the Covid-19 lockdown was being slowly eased in Scotland. We were all glad to see some different scenery I’m sure.

There were quite a lot of people there but it was still fairly easy to lose yourself among the plants and take photos without other people being in the background.

Sadly I couldn’t see any fish in the pond, I suspect that if they put any in there they would be fodder for some kind of birds, possibly a heron. This garden is a short distance from the River Tay, where there are plenty of seabirds around.

I wish I could remember the name of the red flowered climber below, I have a feeling that it’s an annual but I can’t find any images of one like it. That’s one grouse I have about Branklyn, the plants aren’t always labelled. Probably they were all well labelled originally but the plants have engulfed them as they grew.

You can just get a glimpse of the house that the original owners of the garden lived in in the photo below. This is now a Scottish National Trust property but the house is used as a holiday rental so you can’t look around it.

There are some cracking acers/Japanese Maples in this garden. So many people love them but aren’t able to grow them although they’re not that pernickety really, having said that some of mine got damaged by an air frost in May, just as the new growth was looking so good.

It was a sunny day and the sun shining through the top of the acer below was quite something, but the photo doesn’t really capture the moment.

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland – part 1

Posted on 7 July 2020 by Katrina

From Saturday we in Scotland were allowed to travel further than five miles (unless for food shopping) for the first time since the lockdown began in early March. So we took the opportunity to visit Branklyn Garden in Perth, on the way to visiting family thirty miles away from us. As you can see from the three photos above Branklyn has some lovely acers/Japanese maples.

This type of cherry tree bark just keeps getting better every year.

Below is a photo of delphiniums (I think) and an unusual Rhododendron with the new growth being coloured a sort of pale orange.

Quite a few other people had had the same idea and I was surprised to see that the cafe was open, (but only for sitting outdoors.) Things felt almost normal – almost but not quite. There were masks and hand sanitiser at the entrance, but we had brought our own.

The garden is set in about two acres and dates from 1922 when this hillside orchard plot was bought by a couple who wanted to build an Arts and Crafts house there surrounded by a garden which has lots of winding paths around gorgeous planting.

Nowadays Branklyn Garden is owned by the Scottish National Trust. Sadly it was opened up just too late for us to admire the great banks of Himalayan Meconopsis, there were just a few stray petals left on them, not worth photographing. I was pleased to capture this fleeting butterfly though, I think it’s a tortoiseshell although I have no idea what the shrub is called.

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland

Posted on 1 May 2019 by Katrina

Last week we took advantage of a gorgeous blue sky day to visit Branklyn Garden in the ‘fair city’ of Perth – the original one of course, not the one in Australia which is what usually pops up if you google ‘Perth’.

I’m sure that this tree is a type of cherry but there was no sign of any blossom on it – it has fantastic glossy red bark though.

The gardens aren’t huge but they’re just perfect for having a relaxing stroll around and you can have a sit down or even visit the very pleasant tearoom.

This is a hillside garden which is owned by the National Trust. It’s just two acres and it was created in the 1920s using seed collected by plant hunters.

There’s a pond which is fed by a wee waterfall.

The azaleas and rhododendrons were looking perfect.

And you get a good view of Perth from the garden. It’s just a short drive from the city centre.

Lastly, you can just catch a glimpse of the house which was built by the original owners, but it isn’t open to the public. This is a lovely place to visit if you’re near Perth, and you can always buy plants there which have been propagated from plants in the garden.

Random photos

Posted on 16 September 2018 by Katrina

I must have walked past this window in St Andrews hundreds of times but I only noticed it recently. The buildings are generally very old but this is obviously an Art Nouveau/Arts and Crafts window, somebody did a bit of refurbishment over the years.

Across the road I noticed the stone owls sitting on the edge of the portico. I think that like many buildings in St Andrews this one is owned by the university, so presumably the owls are symbolic of wisdom and learning.

It’s rare to see an empty street nowadays, they’re usually full of parked cars on both sides of the street, but on their Open Arts Festival in Cellardyke, a coastal village in Fife, the place was deserted of cars for once. The clutch of red balloons being the only evidence of modernity, denoting where an artist was exhibiting work.

I took the photo below in the fair city of Perth, the hanging baskets and window boxes were looking so lovely. I think the rather grand looking building was a bank originally – remember them?!

I have visited the small town of Dunkeld hundreds of times as it’s one of my favourite places, but I had only ever been into the cathedral ruins there. The photo below is of the newer cathedral which is obviously still in use as a place of worship.

The photo below is the view of Dunkeld that you get as you drive over the bridge.

After visiting the cathedral I walked over the bridge to get a photo of the River Tay. I’ve never seen it so low before, there were actually people walking out to the ‘islands’.

I bet it was still cold though!

Huntingtower Castle, Perth, Scotland

Posted on 2 July 2016 by Katrina

It’s a couple of months since we went to visit Huntingtower Castle near Perth and I had forgotten that I hadn’t blogged about it until Joan of Planet Joan mentioned that she had just finished reading John Buchan’s book Huntingtower. I read it a while ago and you can read what I thought of it here. You can read Joan’s thoughts on Huntingtower here.

Actually I’m not at all sure now if it is the same Huntingtower as the book was set mainly in the south west of Scotland, but I imagined they moved the action here, I can’t see anything linking this place to the book though.

Parts of the tower have windows and other bits are quite open to the elements. Below is a doorway which still has some of the original painted decoration around it, I think it’s quite modern looking.

And what do you think of the painted ceiling? A few of the rooms had designs like this painted on the roof beams. This ceiling dates from around 1540.

Below is a vaulted ceiling on the top floor.

Can you see the rabbit painted on this wall? It has been covered with thick perspex to protect it from the weather.

Below you can see the holes where the wooden beams of the floor/ceiling were originally.

Most Scottish castles/tower houses seem to have these cute wee window seats, they must have been lovely to sit in in the summer anyway, a perfect spot for reading or sewing. You have to imagine the rooms would have been hung with tapestries and cushions or fur would have been on the seats.

There are loads of spiral staircases to investigate in Huntingtower and one of them leads up to this part of the roof.

Although there’s now a shopping centre very close to Huntingtower most of the surrounding countryside is still farmland, so not too different from how it would have been when John Buchan set part of his book Huntingtower here.

The castle is now home to a large colony of pipistrelle bats, but we didn’t see any evidence of them, it was too early for them to be out and about.

Mary Queen of Scots lived here for a while with her husband Lord Darnley, she seems to have been in just about every castle in Scotland, often as a prisoner. She was a woman who should have copied her cousin Elizabeth of England’s style and stayed well away from marriage!

Marooned in Fife

Posted on 8 December 2015 by Katrina

Marooned is exactly how I feel as the Forth Road Bridge has been closed for the last week or so and will remain closed until after the New Year. Crack(s) have been discovered. I suppose it’s a good thing that the bridge is inspected very frequently for signs of stress. I’ve never been happy going over it but over the last couple of months even Jack said that he wasn’t happy about driving over it – maybe he’s psychic! Below is a photo of the crack in the structure.

Forth Road Bridge

Anyway, it means that we’re marooned on the Fife side of the River Forth, and we usually go into Edinburgh once a week or so. There seems no point in going on a long detour to the Kincardine Bridge, especially as it is going to be chock full with people who just have to get to Edinburgh for work purposes.

So my Christmas shopping, such as it is, is going to be done fairly locally this year. It strikes me that some shops might be happy about that. One town which I’ll probably be visiting is Perth. I thought you might be interested to see a photo I took earlier in the year of the ceiling of Perth’s Lakeland shop. I love kitchen ware shops and I’m putting that forward as my excuse for not noticing before that the shop has a wonderfully ornate ceiling. How grand is that for a kitchenware shop?!

I’m usually quite good at looking up and seeing the details of buildings, although I most often scrutinise the outside of buildings. It was only when Laura mentioned that Lakeland was part of Perth’s Open Doors weekend earlier in the year that I thought I must have missed something – too intent on looking at kitchen stuff I suppose.

Back in the mid 19th century the building was the Central Bank, and it was designed by David Rhind in Italian palazzo style.

Lakeland Perth

Be sure to look up if you’re visiting the shop.

The Mount Stewart Murder by Chris Paton

Posted on 15 August 2012 by Katrina

Although I enjoy crime fiction and particularly vintage crime I don’t often read books about real life murder but I saw this book at my library and was drawn to read it because the murder in question took place in Perthshire, not all that far from where I live.

The author came across the story of the murder whilst he was researching his family tree, as many people have been doing recently. He discovered that his great-great-great-grandmother Janet Rogers had been horribly murdered in her own home at Forgandenny, Perthshire in 1866.

Chris Paton has used the many newspaper accounts of the crime which went into great detail of the crime scene, post mortem and subsequent police investigation and the trial of the accused. He has embroidered the details and it all amounts to an interesting read, although there’s probably an added frisson when you know the areas concerned, as I do. It is thought that the murder is the UK’s oldest unsolved case.

I was particularly amazed when another murder was mentioned which took place in 1865 on the Dollar to Blairingone road, close to what is described in the book as Vicker’s Bridge.* A baker’s cart was discovered abandoned on the road and the baker was found to be dying nearby, he had been shot and he was apparently killed for his ‘takings’. The upshot of that investigation seems to be that a poacher called Joseph Bell was hanged for murder at Perth prison. It was the last public hanging in Scotland and it seems that jurors might have been reluctant in the past to pass guilty verdicts because there hadn’t been a hanging for 17 years in Scotland until that one. The railway company had to put on extra trains as so many people wanted to see the spectacle! The supposed culprit protested his innocence to the end and I think the main grievance against him was the fact that he was English! It was almost 100 years from then until the death penalty was repealed. As you can imagine I’m going to be having a careful look at the road around Vicar’s Bridge* the next time I travel along it.

*The modern road sign is spelled Vicar’s Bridge.

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

Tag Archives: Perth

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland – part 1

River Tay, Perth, Scotland

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland – part 2

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland – part 1

Branklyn Garden, Perth, Scotland

Random photos

Huntingtower Castle, Perth, Scotland

Marooned in Fife

The Mount Stewart Murder by Chris Paton