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Each month we write a report for the community about our activities and oncoming events. Here you can keep up to date with what we are doing. For Perth & Kinross Council assistance with environmental problems,eg A-Boards, flyposting, dog-fouling, graffiti, litter etc please telephone 01738 476 476.
What a wonderful month September was for us, Take a Pride in Perthshire Shield for Best Small Country Town, RBLS Perthshire & Angus Trophy for the War Memorial & Gardens, the Linton Trophy for Horticultural Excellence from beautifulScotland and a Gold Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society in Britain in Bloom. We would like to thank the many, many folks who have helped us this year, we couldn't have achieved all this without your sterling support.
March & April 2008
March brought Easter early this year and we had a busy Easter Coffee Morning thanks to Bells Blair Athol Distillery. We must also thank our stalwart knitters, who kept Kath and her team busy delivering Easter baskets all over town. We held our Spring helpers meeting and managed to persuade enough of them to help plant up 1,500 orange winter/spring pansies at the new hospital in an hour and a half!! We still have some primulas to put in, but the ground is very waterlogged and sticky down there!!
April brought the litterpickers and yellow jackets out and a massive amount of litter was collected all over town by "Hope 2008" and various individuals. We are very grateful to all who gave up their time and helped out in Spring Clean Month.
We shall be doing a Fund-raising Bag-Pack at the Co-op the first weekend in May, to fund the summer baskets as price increases have hit us hard this year. Please support us if you can.
January & February 2008
Pitlochry in Bloom always try to have a short break in the winter months, unfortunately, it never seems to work out that way. We spent a busy morning planting daffodils at the new Atholl Medical Centre in the Christmas recess once we had clearance from the Site Manager. We hope to add some winter pansies soon, when the ground is less soggy & cold, this should give a little bit of spring colour. The 2007 trophies & certificates are all now displayed in the Library window, after their recent refurbishment, quite a collection last year! We have been busy balancing the books ready for our AGM and planning and making lists for 2008. There is so much we would like to do, but of course, that is all dependent on monies being available. We are still working away on one or two long-term projects, which are moving, oh, so slowly. And on or two new things which are gathering momentum, we are hoping to do much more work with our local schools in the near future.
PITLOCHRY AUTUMN FESTIVAL - An exciting new project for us to expand on now is our Storytelling event, the "Silver Branch" started as part of the Pitlochry Autumn Festival. We commissioned Claire Hewitt to work with the children attending the Enchanted Forest and she sang songs and told stories nightly in the Yurt inside the Hallowe'en Marquee. This event was made possible by the very generous sponsorship from the Atholl Palace and Green Park Hotels, funding from Pitlochry in Bloom & Take a Pride in Perthshire and goodies sponsored by many companies including CJ Lang, Haribo & Ribena. We are very grateful to all of them for supporting this project which reached around 1,500 children over the duration of the event. We are now working on Phase 2 of this Project with Claire & Ruth Atkinson which will take Felt Stories to most of the Highland Perthshire cluster schools and give all the children a Felt Panel of their own to enhance their Storytelling corners. We also hope to hold some community Felting sessions for adults.We hope that everyone will support this project, so it can continue to grow in future..
Pitlochry in Bloom August 2007
What a hectic month August has been for us, and the weather has been dreadful!! At last all of our judging is finished, both locally, regionally and nationally, we have hosted Evelyn & Sandy Gray for Take a Pride in Perthshire, Natasha Morrison and George Anderson from Beautiful Scotland and Jon Wheatley and Carolyn Wilson from Britain in Bloom, we now have to wait until next month for the results. We were delighted to have relatively fine days for all of our judging and the final local competition was judged by Betty Ivey and Mildred Thomson of the Scottish Rock Plant Association, results are attached below.
We can only thank everyone who helped us during judging, the town looked spotless, the judges kept looking for litter and couldn't find any. The Community Council had also been out litterpicking, all the flyposting was removed and the stalwart males on our Committee had shinned up ladders to remove the weeds growing out of the gutterings on the Victorian Arcades. The Council even painted the benches at long last. All we can do now is await the judges deliberations.
We have finally had two of our new entrance features put in place, third one coming shortly, the North End of Atholl road is due to be planted up in the autumn with attractive shrubs and heathers. We also managed to persuade P&K Council to replace the hedge in Bonnethill road with an attractive wattle fence and we revamped the Tourist Office Bed.
We also managed to fit in Secret Gardens Day, another "Glastonbury" for us, but we had some stalwart attendees come all the way from Ayr and Fife, the bottle of Blair Athol Malt was drawn by Ms Hammond of Carnoustie, we hope she enjoys it!! We thank everyone who was so generous with filling our buckets at the Co-op bag-pack, the Treasurer says we can now order some daffodils for the new medical centre!! We raised a magnificent £800 , we have found a new vocation!! And finally, we had the usual fun & games night at the Pitlochry Bowling Club Quiz, grateful thanks to Elma & Jessie and Malcolm Howley our quizmaster.
If you have any environmental concerns, please ring the P&KC Helpline on 01737 476 476.
Happy Gardening
Mary Bover- Secretary 470051
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