Friday 11 July 2008

Suntrap Garden, Edinburgh

I visited the Suntrap Garden in the west of Edinburgh, yesterday. It's a wonderful place, full of small gardens each with a different focus, there's a formal garden, an Italian garden, some mini allotments and a collection of bonsai trees. In this post I've included photos of some of the examples of recycled crafts and environmentally friendly gardening at Suntrap. In the first photo you can see the mini compost bins in the mini allotments, you can also see sedum roofs on top of the green archways, sedum is often planted on green roofs as it is low growing and resilient. The sedum roofs here were recycled from a demonstration roof that had been used in a gardening show. In the second photo you can see a mini greenhouse made from recycled plastic bottles.




The third photo shows a display made from recycled materials with plants growing over them. This display was made by pupils from a school that has worked with the Suntrap. As well as being a wonderful garden, the Suntrap is an adult education centre, part of a local college, offering evening classes in garden design and amateur gardening and working with adults with learning disabilities, secondary school pupils and using volunteers to do a fair amount of the work of the garden. Suntrap is also open to the public most days and plants are available for sale.

As a haiku writer, I think the bonsai trees deserve a post of their own, so watch out for that in the next week or so...

8 comments:

polona said...

this looks really interesting... looking forward to the bonsai :)

Anonymous said...

What a fantastic garden. The greenhouse made from recycled plastic bottles is really inspiring. Thanks for letting us know about it.

d. moll, l.ac. said...

Fantastic, is that a typewriter being used as a planter in the last pic on the lower right??????

Jenn: said...

I thought the recycled bottle greenhouse was amazing until I saw the last photo! Wonderful image! Your blog is always fun to visit.

Janice Thomson said...

Gosh there's some fantastic ideas there including the plastic greenhouse. Some ideas to think about for sure. Since I grow my own bonsai can't wait to see the next photos :)

RG said...

Lotsa work with pretty results!

AscenderRisesAbove said...

what a wonderful place to visit; chuck full of gardening ideas and I could see how a learning center would fit right in! I always wanted to do a bonsai tree; and tried to take a small redwood that I had here and convert it into a bonsai tree... of course I did it entirely wrong and it must be worked on from almost the newly emerged seed. me? I stood there trying to pluck one back. Another experiment gone wrong.

Cynthia said...

Thw mini green house is a wonderful
idea, I'm going to see if it can be done by all-thumbs me.lm