Pitlochry Wild Life Garden Spring update 2007

Throughout the winter months a team from the Scottish Wildlife Trust Pitlochry Centre have been paying regular visits to the garden ensuring the birdfeeders are replenished & to carry out maintenance tasks. Some transplanting from the flowerbed to the meadow has taken place & the pond has been cleared of excess pondweed and moss which was encroaching on the pond margins.

Seed heads were left on the flowering plants to provide winter feed for the birds & the hollow stems of some of the larger species in both woodland & the meadow were left in place to provide a home for hibernating insects.

Now that Spring has arrived the garden has begun to come to life. We have had a fine display of snowdrops, enhanced by those donated by the Atholl Palace Hotel, followed by winter aconites and now in flower are the wild daffodils and wood anemones. The primroses & cowslips are beginning to show.

On their most recent visit to the garden (April) the maintenance team were delighted to see frog spawn in the pond, for the first time. We also found an amazing number of snails hibernating under the moss in the meadow.

The raised flowerbed has now been cleared of the dead vegetation, and the buddleia in the "butterfly border" has received its first pruning. We shall continue to prune at intervals to ensure a continual flowering & food supply.

With the assistance of Pitlochry in Bloom we are now busy adding a new feature to the garden in the form of a rockery. This feature is in memory of Meg Dunn, a keen naturalist, botanist & photographer, who was one of the "driving forces" behind the creation of the Wildlife Garden & was an inspiration to us all.

Although very much in the early stages we intend to plant-up with native species & hope to be able to introduce some of the plants which are typical to Ben Lawers. We are extremely grateful to Willie Grieve for donating the rock and topsoil for this project (the soil coming from the new hospital site)and to Stewart McNeish for his rapid help & assistance.

History of the Wildlife Garden

It was early 1998 when Pitlochry in Bloom turned their attention to the 977 square metre site directly opposite the Bells Blair Athol Distillery. The land, which had lain untouched for almost 50 years, had many disadvantages which made it unsuitable for development and greatly limited its potential. It is adjacent to the town sewage works, is crossed by underground service pipes and a high voltage electricity cable. Overhead are telephone wires and it is bordered by a gas main. Badly overgrown, it could not be excavated. What could be done to turn this into an amenity for the community?

The answer was to work with what was already there to create a wildlife garden of varied habitats, which would provide enjoyment for the local community and visitors and an educational resource.

The permission to go ahead was given by the landowner who leased the land at a peppercorn rent and a partnership was formed between PIB and the local group of the Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT) who could provide the required expertise.

A grant from Scottish Natural Heritage and a generous donation from Bells Distillery Water of Life Foundation secured funding for the project but before work could begin a botanical survey of the site was required and detailed plans were drawn up. The botanical survey carried out at that time by the SWT recorded 33 different plants & grasses present. Plans to provide the various habitats - a raised wildflower bed, a sunny butterfly border, a beastie corner, a pond, woodland edge and central meadow were drawn and a suggested planting list was provided by staff based at the SWT Juniper Wildlife Garden Project at Grangemouth.

Work to clear the site began in October 1998 and was undertaken by the SWT Conservation team. The team was made up of twelve unemployed volunteers on a training for work programme, funded by Scottish Enterprise Tayside, and under the leadership of a SWT ranger.

The skills learnt by the volunteers whilst constructing the garden would help towards them securing future employment and in gaining their Scottish Vocational Qualification.

For several weeks snow & ice almost stopped work as the lorries were unable to reach the Shierglass Quarry to obtain the stone kindly donated by Thistle Aggregates, to build the dry stone dyke. Work was therefore switched to constructing the raised bed, using split logs, given to us by Forest Enterprise, and excavating the pond.

In November children from Pitlochry High School visited the garden and helped plant twenty native trees, and several hundred flowering bulbs (snowdrops, wild daffodils, wood anemones and bluebells) in the woodland. The children attached labels bearing their names so that they could identify which tree they had planted and watch it grow.

By March 1999 we were ready to fill the pond - this does not have its own water supply and quite a crowd of children, parents and helpers gathered to watch as Pitlochry Firefighters obliged with 1575 gallons of water. By April 2000 wildflower plants were added to the raised flower bed, seeds were sown and spring planting was completed in May when nectar providing plants were added to the sunny butterfly border and 70 cowslips, donated by Tynreich Nurseries, were planted out in various parts of the garden.

A poster competition to involve the local schoolchildren was organised by the WWF in Aberfeldy.

Finally seats & features were added to the garden, nest boxes made by local children were erected along with bird roosts and feeders. The ladybird gates made by prisoners at HMP Castle Huntly were installed along with a beautiful ladybird bench made by David Ogilvie.

The Pitlochry Wildlife Garden was officially opened by Walter Gilmour of BBC's Beechgrove Garden on 21st June 1999.

The opening of the garden was in fact only the beginning, over the past 9 years the garden has matured. The raised bed is now full of colour from spring to beyond the first frosts and is now providing nursery stock for transplanting elsewhere in the garden or for sale.

Seed heads left on the plants throughout the winter provide a valuable food source for the birds and their hollow stems places for insects to hibernate. The pond & its margins are full of life and we are now treated to a fine display of water lilies in the summer. Damsel flies have been seen, along with pond skaters & other aquatic insects, but as yet we have no frogs or newts, but live in hope. Summer 2003 was exceptionally dry & sunny and we were thrilled by the number of butterflies visiting the garden to bask in the sun and feed on the buddleia.

The woodland trees continue to grow & the bulbs multiply, but it will be several years yet before the trees mature to form a canopy and provide the shade necessary to suppress plant growth and thus form a true woodland floor. A recent count of botanical specimens showed an increase up to nearly 100 different plants & grasses, a tripling in 7 years. We were delighted this winter to welcome moles into the garden. The moles have managed what we could not, they have dug molehills in the central meadow for us. We have now been able to plant in the soil thrown up by the molehills and look forward to the plants growing this summer.