Carole and Ian Bainbridge will share with us the process by which they created and built a new garden over the past 10+ years. The garden has rock, boulder, scree and crevice beds, a stumpery and a pond, and more traditional shrub and herbaceous beds including a New Zealand bed.

Drs Carole and Ian Bainbridge are both keen rock gardeners from south-west Scotland. Ian’s career was in nature conservation and ecology; he was Chief Ecological Adviser to the Sottish Government, and Head of Science at the Scottish nature conservation agency.  Carole came from a horticultural family, and followed a biology doctorate with a career in business, including in the European Commission.  She subsequently retrained in garden design, and ran her own design company for 20 years.

Since their retirement, they have been working on their Galloway garden, started from scratch in 2010, after they moved from Edinburgh after 31 years.  The garden has rock, boulder, scree and crevice beds, a stumpery and a pond, and more traditional shrub and herbaceous beds including a New Zealand bed.

Carole and Ian have been involved with the Scottish Rock Garden Club for more years than they like to admit. Over 40 years they have travelled to all six continents in search of alpines. They have been on three visits to Patagonia; and several to North America. There have been many trips to European mountains, and they have visited China and New Zealand.