Saughton Park Winter Garden

The land of Saughton Park, west of Edinburgh's centre, is first recorded in 1128, in the charter by which David I founded Holyrood Abbey and granted it, among other lands, a willow plantation at Saughtonhall. In the seventeenth century the estate passed to the Baird family, whose descendants lived in the mansion until the 1770s. The house was later let as a private asylum for patients of rank, and from the 1830s one of its doctors, William Lowe, practised an early form of horticultural therapy in the grounds; the last patients left in December 1906.

The city's purchase is dated 1900 according to Wikipedia, 1905 for the park and 1907 for the house according to the Friends of Saughton Park. From 1 May to 31 October 1908 the grounds hosted the Scottish National Exhibition, which drew some 3.5 million visitors; a first winter garden and the Gorgie Road entrance were built for it. Laid out by the parks superintendent John William McHattie with £4,000 from the exhibition fund, the park opened to the public in June 1910.

Throughout the twentieth century the park kept a winter garden and a rose garden, the latter re-created in the 1960s; the present Winter Garden was created in 1984. After a Heritage Lottery Fund development grant in July 2013, restoration work started on 15 August 2017, covering the walled garden, the winter garden, the stables, converted into a base for the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, a new café and the reinstatement of the 1909 bandstand removed in 1987. The announced cost rose from £5.2 million to £6.7 million and then £8 million, with £3.8 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The Princess Royal, patron of the society, officially reopened the park in June 2019, and it won a Green Flag Award in 2020.

The Friends of the park date the Winter Garden to 1984; the quantity surveyor of the 2017-2019 works states only that the glasshouse in the Winter Garden was repaired, while a Geograph photographer described a new glasshouse nearing completion in June 2019. The restoration was designed by the architects Sutherland Hussey Harris with the landscape architects Ironside Farrar, and built by P1 Solutions and then Clark Contracts. The glasshouse stands in the walled garden on the north side of the park, near Balgreen Road, where the Friends of Saughton Park have their address; the walls were repaired and renewed and new access paths laid, and the neighbouring stables became a community hub.

What sets the site apart is its heating. Two ground-source heat pumps serve the café, the visitor facilities and the greenhouses: the first draws on twelve vertical boreholes about 150 m deep beneath a car park, the second on horizontal trenches about 1.5 m below half a football pitch; each lifts the ground's warmth from about 5 °C to about 50 °C, saving an estimated 72 tonnes of CO2 a year. Their electricity comes from a micro-hydro scheme on an existing weir of the Water of Leith: an Archimedes screw turbine 10 m long and weighing 10 tonnes, rated at 39 kW, begun in May 2019 and funded with about £500,000 from Scottish Power's Green Economy Fund. A planned connection to a district heat network was dropped as commercially unviable.

Under the glass, Wikipedia records tropical plants, a bust of Mahatma Gandhi and a statue of the goddess Sakthi; according to the caption of a June 2019 photograph, the latter represents the Universal Mother, Sakthi or Amman, identified in Hindu mythology with Parvati, the wife of Shiva.

The Winter Garden belongs to a wider set of gardens. The walled garden has been fully renovated. The rose garden, which the Water of Leith trail counts among the few surviving features of the 1908 layout, was re-created in the 1960s and replanted during the restoration with roses worth more than £40,000, among thousands of roses and shrubs. There are also a physic garden and three community orchards: a trained orchard, a wild orchard and a park-border orchard. In the 1950s an Italian garden and a garden for the blind were made, and during the Second World War onions were grown here for the city's hospitals. Along the Water of Leith, which runs beside the park, otters, kingfishers and herons are seen, and goosanders visit in winter.

The Winter Garden and its walled garden lie on the north side of the park, towards Balgreen Road. The 34-acre park is crossed by the Water of Leith Walkway and the John Muir Way, so it can be reached on foot or by bicycle from the city centre or from Gorgie. It is open daily and entry is free. Allow an hour for the glasshouse, the rose garden in summer and the restored bandstand, where performances are held; the café and the stables, home to the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, round off the visit. Four kilometres away, the Victorian palm houses of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh offer a comparison on another scale.