The Scottish Garden Plant Award

Scotland’s very varied and particular climate suits a huge variety of plants, but there are a great many that do well further south but struggle in Scotland, because of lack of heat, winter wet or other factors; this includes many plants which have the RHS Award of Garden Merit (AGM). Conversely, many of the best performers in Scotland are not as happy further south – for example, many alpines, meconopsis, and Tropaeolum speciosum.

The most serious flaw with the AGM, from a Scottish perspective, is the RHS H4 hardiness rating. This is defined as ‘hardy throughout the British Isles’, but in reality many plants with this rating are simply not reliably hardy in colder/inland gardens in England, and many of them are tender in Scotland away from the coast. We decided therefore to create an additional rating for the hardiest plants, so we have created an H5 rating for plants, suitable for cold, inland and high altitude gardens.

The notion of a ‘Scottish Garden Plant Award’ grew from these issues. The RHS Plant Finder contains 70,000 plant names. In the face of so many plants on offer, we thought it would be useful to point gardeners in the direction of the most reliable, tried-and-tested plants, which are the best of their type for Scottish gardens. We hope that the award will be used on plant labels in Scotland to help gardeners make the best selection of an often bewildering range of plants.

To consider which plants should receive the award, we assembled an impressive group of judges, representing a wide spectrum of Scottish horticultural expertise. Sometimes there was agreement, sometimes not. We now have a list of 500 plants that have been awarded the Scottish Gardenplant Award or SGA. Their hardindess ratings H1-H5 are included. You can be sure that plants listed here with the SGA symbol are a very good starting point for gardeners from one end of Scotland to the other. The list of Scottish Gardenplant Award plants is also available on Glendoick Gardens (www.glendoick.com)  

Ken Cox