Scottish Garden Design Competition 2025
The Scottish Garden Design Competition gives designers from across the country the opportunity to challenge their horticultural knowledge and skills by creating a show garden that will be on display at the Scone Palace Garden Fair.
The theme of this year’s competition, is ‘Hope’. This is open to interpretation by each gardener, offering endless possibilities for creativity and expression. Whether it’s through vibrant plant choices, innovative sculptural features, or thoughtful use of space, we encourage designers to reflect on how gardens can embody optimism, renewal, and the resilience of nature.
For the first time in the competition's history there will be two categories of garden, the Small Space Gardens, and the all new Showcase Garden category.
Small Space Gardens
The Small Space Gardens category challenges budding amateurs, hobbyists, and students to produce stunning creations on a small scale. The 10 finalists will be in a bid to claim the prize of Best Small Space Garden, as well as the People's Choice Award, voted for by visitors.
This category is open to anyone with a love of gardening, from weekend hobbyist to professional gardener, modern social media star to old-school allotmenteer, charities and garden societies, or horticultural students at the start of their career - everyone is welcome!
Showcase Gardens
A new category for 2025, the Showcase Gardens will demonstrate the very best of the Scottish garden design and landscaping community with a large scale Showcase Garden and longer build time.
We wish this to be the showcase for the many talented garden designers and landscapers we have working in our country, featuring excellence and imagination in the designs, plants chosen, and materials used.
The uniqueness of the Showcase Gardens category is that these will not only be on show for the duration of the Scone Palace Garden Fair, but the three finalists' gardens will remain in the gardens for 9 months. This will provide a greater challenge to the designer who must consider how the garden will be viewed not only by visitors to the event, but also during the other seasons of the year by the 100,000 visitors who visit Scone Palace annually.
2024 Competition Gallery
