Beechgrove Garden coming to Durness

 

8th March 2002

 

Durness Gardening Group learned this week that their bid to feature the village in the next series of the BBC’s popular “Beechgrove Garden” TV programme has been successful.
From the hundreds of applications submitted from all over Scotland, Durness made it through to the last 12.
The programme producer and assistant visited all the finalists last week and selected five to be included in the next series, to be filmed in the summer.
The programme will focus on landscaping of the site around the new village hall in Durness. The community will be responsible for most of the work, but are allocated a budget by the programme makers as well as the services of a landscape garden designer.
The programme will be filmed in August when the Beechgrove Garden presenters will put the finishing touches to the planting.
The programme will also include visits to gardens around the Durness area and a selection of gardening questions from local residents

 

29th. March 2002

 

Beechgrove Garden – A television cameraman visited Durness this week to film the are before any landscaping is started by the Beechgrove Garden team. This will be the basis of a “before and after” comparison when the TV programme is recorded in August.
The designer, Nick Dawson from Pitlochry, will be visiting Durness this Easter weekend to discuss design proposals with some members of the gardening group.
The Beechgrove Garden has been on the air since 1979 and is one of BBC Scotland’s most successful programmes. The idea to invite them to landscape the area around the new village hall came from Connie Macarthur when she presented a garden seat in memory of her late husband Angus, to be situated outside the new hall.
Connie contacted the programme for an application form and Graham Bruce completed the questionnaire and submitted the proposals. It is being predicted that this project could have excellent repercussions for the area. Many people travel great distances to visit public gardens and this could be the most northerly on the British mainland.

June Update

The ground plans have arrived from Nick Dawson the garden designer. They are ambitious and said to be one of the biggest and impressive that the Beechgrove have tackled. This is the first public garden to be created this far north on the mainland. The Beechgrove team will be in Durness for the filming from the 14-16 August but are likely to be arriving earlier. Jim Micol and Carolyn Baxter are visiting on the 4th. and 5th. July to meet with the local committee and visit some of the gardens in the area. The local group have had to come up with a selection of gardening questions and people to ask them during recording, The problem corners are to be various problems gardeners find in the locality and through the garden gate will be the team visiting several established gardens in the community.

The Beechgrove have enlisted the help of the coastguards fro their filming of the show and will be able to have ariel shots from the helicopter. On the Friday night after the filming there will be a Ceilidh in the hall to celebrate the event and one year of the opening of the hall. Everybody will be welcome and further details will be announced soon.

The local group are responsible for sourcing most of the materials necessary that is required for the design and they are looking for  a selection of local materials that can be incorporated into the garden.. A sculptress that has worked with the Beechgrove team in the past has offered her services. She makes Geese from plough blades and if some can be found she is willing to come to Durness to include her art. There is to be a John Lennon memorial garden, A Lotte Glob water feature, children's play area, sheltered sites and crazy paved areas with Cattiness slab.

 

Beechgrove Garden – Jim McColl and Carole Baxter, presenters from the BBC’s Beechgrove Garden TV programme, visited the community garden project and landscaping scheme that will be televised next month. They were in Durness for two days last week to meet members of the community and, as well as discussing the project, were calling in on gardens in the village that could be included in the programme.
Graham Bruce, chairman of the gardening group and local co-ordinator of the scheme, escorted the presenters around the village. There has been a great deal of local input into the project and this is being remarked upon as a genuinely community effort. Carol and Jim are looking forward to visiting again next month and it’s hoped they will join in the celebratory ceilidh on August 16 to mark the first anniversary of the hall and the Beechgrove Garden’s Durness programme.

 

Garden memorial marks John Lennon’s links with Durness

 

A memorial commemorating John Lennon’s links with Durness, which helped inspire the Beatles song “In My Life”, was unveiled on Wednesday.
The new memorial marks the fact that Lennon spent childhood holidays in the village, returning with Yoko and their respective children in 1969.
It has been erected as part of a Beechgrove Garden “community special”, which will be transmitted on BBC 2 Scotland on Thursday, August 22 at 8.30pm.
The memorial is a set of three standing stones, created by local craftsman Neil Fuller, which feature lyrics from the song In My Life (There are places I remember …). They were erected this week as filming started for the Beechgrove Garden programme, which will be devoted to the community project in Durness.
Attending was Stan Parkes, Lennon’s cousin who visited Durness with John on numerous occasions. Said Mr Parkes, who now lives in Largs and will be featured in the programme: “John was nine when he started coming up with us to the croft in Durness.
“The croft belonged to my stepfather and John just loved the wildness and the openness of the place. So much so that he took Yoko, his son Julian and her daughter Kyoko specially to visit to see the place he had loved so much from his childhood holidays.
“This memorial from the people of Durness, and of course Beechgrove Garden, is great. John would be thrilled with this tribute and I know it would have meant more to him than any fancy statue in a hotel or whatever in Liverpool. He really loved Durness and he would love this tribute.”
Beechgrove presenter Lesley Watson said: “The work the local community has put into creating the garden here is amazing. Durness is a special place and to have this link with John Lennon commemorated in this way is lovely.”
Graham Bruce, chairman of the Durness Gardeners’ Group, said: “We’ve got a sign up about the Beechgrove project and we’ve had visitors coming by and helping out just from that. Once people know about the new garden and the John Lennon memorial I’m anticipating a significant rise in visitors to Durness.
“Being so remote, we haven’t been able to call on outside agencies or whatever. All the hard work has been down to the local people, who have mucked in with whatever they could, but our thanks also go to the Beechgrove Garden team for their support and expertise.”
The newly created garden at Durness, which includes the memorial, will also feature a courtyard and sheltered areas. The designer is Edinburgh-based Nick Dawson, the project manager of the new Pitlochry Theatre (Plant Collectors) Garden.
The Durness garden is being created by the community for the community, with a little help from the Beechgrove team.
While the Beechgrove presenters Jim McColl, Carole Baxter, Lesley Watson and Carolyn Spray are in Durness they will be helping to finish off the new garden but they will also be out and about in the Durness area trying to solve a few problems, answer a few questions, visit some local gardens and gardeners.
Said a BBC spokeswoman: “Durness is the most northerly community garden on mainland UK and is the most exposed and challenging site the Beechgrove team have ever tackled.”

 

Beechgrove Garden – Over 200 people attended an informal ceilidh in the village hall last Friday evening to celebrate the opening of the Beechgrove Garden landscaping scheme. After a small ceremony to mark the end of a busy 12-week period and the final week of intense activity for the filming of the TV programme, screened on Thursday night, the hall resounded to a diverse selection of music.
Local musicians Katy, Donny and Marty started off the evening with a selection of Scottish dance music. Eleanor Leith held the audience spellbound while she played and sang several songs from her repertoire. Local youth band Broken Chord played a tribute to John Lennon with the song “In my Life”, the lyrics of which were apparently inspired by his childhood memories of the Highlands. Melvich Gaelic Choir finished off the first half with two songs, beautifully sung.
The hall committee provided teas and sandwiches and a raffle raised funds towards the future maintenance of the garden. The second half of the ceilidh was opened with songs from Raymond Bremner. The dance continued with Jim McColl and Bob the sound recorder from The Beechgrove Garden joining Katy and Donny on stage for what was an excellent night to celebrate Durness Village Hall’s first year and the most north-westerly public community garden on mainland Britain.
This week has seen the final touches being added to the weeks of volunteer work that has gone into the garden, a project initiated by Connie McArthur and co-ordinated by Graham Bruce. The transformation has been amazing.
Along with filming at the community garden, the television crew have been in and around Durness all week visiting individual gardens and supplying tips and advice.
On Wednesday morning Stan Parkes, a cousin of the late John Lennon, and showing some emotion, opened the memorial garden to the former Beatle. With a small press presence Stan declared that he felt sure John would appreciate this small memorial in the Highlands where he spent many happy childhood holidays. The family of Stan Parkes has a long association with Durness and this memorial is recognised as a tribute to John Lennon the family man, a much forgotten phase of his life. It has been this connection that has attracted national and international media interest.
An e-mail from America said the Durness garden project had even made two-paragraphs in the Philadelphia Inquirer!
There has been considerable uptake on the sponsorship of township names but there are plenty that could be included if people are still interested. Full details of the scheme will be included on the fact sheet to accompany the programme and can be seen on the Beechgrove website. This will also be incorporated on the Durness website.
It will be a few years before the full benefit of the scheme is apparent. The different areas of the garden are quite well defined but the plants will take time to establish in the exposed situation. In his opening speech Graham Bruce, chairman of the gardening group, promised that this garden would be well maintained.
Community gardens are a relatively new feature for the Beechgrove Garden and there is no clear policy about returning to visit their projects. An invitation was made and this will be given serious consideration. Whether they come back to film the garden or not, the whole team declared that this would certainly not be their last visit. They have helped in moving forward a rather great challenge to the community that has been met with co-operation and a lot hard work.
This week has given people an interesting look behind the scenes of one of the longest running garden programmes on TV, and the community declared that they felt honored and privileged to have been involved in created a lasting memorial. Much of the filming involved a lot of waiting around while cameras shots were arranged. Durness was chosen from hundreds of applications.
The final filming was completed on Friday afternoon and although there was a decent crowd it was disappointing that many of the people who had given their services to the garden were unable to attend. The crowd scene at the end of the television programme may not therefore give a true reflection of the large number of people who put in many hours of hard work.
Interest in the site is continues to grow and all week there has been a steady flow of people visiting the garden, some coming from quite a distance on the strength of the reports about the John Lennon memorial.