GARDENING IN THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS. 



47 



GAEDENING IN THE WESTERN HIGHLANDS. 

 By Osgood Mackenzie, F.R.H.S. 

 [Lecture read May 12, 1908.] 



In the year 1862 my mother bought for me the two adjoining estates 

 of Inverewe and Kernsary, on the west coast of Ross-shire. 



Kernsary lay inland, but Inverewe had a good many miles of coast-line, 

 and, after taking about two years to settle as to where we should make 

 our home, we finally pitched upon the neck of a barren peninsula as the 

 site of the house. The peninsula was a high rocky bluff, jutting out 

 into the sea, and the rest of what are in Scotland usually called " the 

 policies " (i.e., the enclosed grounds round about the mansion) consisted 

 mostly of steep braes facing south and west, with the exception of a 

 narrow strip of land down by the shore — the only bit where the coast- 

 line was not rocky — and this strip, which was an old sea-beach, was 

 turned into the garden. I may say the peninsula, whose Gaelic name, 

 Am Ploc ard (the High Lump), so aptly describes it, consisted of a mass 

 of Torridon red sandstone (which is, I think, a pre-Cambrian formation, 

 and lies on the top of the Lewisian gneiss). This promontory, where 

 the rock was not actually a bare slab, was mostly covered with short 

 heather and still shorter crowberry, and positively the only soil on it 

 was some black peat, varying from an inch to two or three feet in depth. 

 There had been more peat originally in some of the hollows, but it had 

 been dug out for fuel by the crofters who had occupied the place 

 forty years before my time. There was nothing approaching good soil 

 on any part of the peninsula, hardly even any gravel or sand ; but in a 

 few places the rotten rock and the peat had somehow got jumbled up 

 together, and when we came across some of this we thought it grand stuff 

 in comparison with the rest. There was just perhaps one redeeming 

 point about what was otherwise so hopeless a subject for planting, 

 viz., that the rock was not altogether solid. 



We had to excavate a great deal of the rock behind the site of the 

 house before we could begin to build, and we noticed that the deeper we 

 blasted into it the softer it became, and that there were even running 

 through it veins of a pink kind of clay ; but, on the other hand, the 

 exposure of the Ploc ard was awful, catching, as it did, nearly every gale 

 that blew, and, with the exception of the thin low line of the north end 

 of the Lewis, right away on the horizon, forty miles off, there was nothing 

 between its top and Newfoundland ; and it was continually being soused 

 with salt spray. 



The braes above the site of the house were somewhat better, but even 

 they were swept by the south-westerly gales, which are so constant, and 

 so severe, in these parts. 



Now, before proceeding with my story, I think I ought to explain 

 that, with the exception of two tiny bushes of dwarf willow about 



