From absolute beginner to national finalist: Mercat Cottage Garden
by Sheila M. Averbuch, a gardener and author based in Pencaitland. Mercat Cottage Garden opens on Friday and Saturday 24 and 25 April 2026. Follow Sheila on Instagram at http://www.instagram.com/sheilamaverbuch
Vote now in BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine’s Garden of the Year
This summer, a shock phone call from BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine told me I’d been shortlisted in its Garden of The Year Competition. This still seems like an impossible turn of events, because I knew worse than nothing when I began gardening here in East Lothian. You hear gardeners say this kind of thing, but I mean it – virtually everything I tried was a tragicomic disaster. I bought a sack of daffodils and nestled every bulb into the soil the wrong way up. I filled window boxes with petunias that crisped and died (I’d assumed the reliable rain would water them). All my life I’d wanted a garden, but I felt like a failure.
Thank goodness for books. My mother-in-law pressed a brown volume into my hands: the RHS Encyclopedia Of Gardening. It was my gateway book, and I went on to devour everything by the greats -- Gertrude Jekyll, Rosemary Verey and Graham Thomas taught me everything I know, and all the best ideas I’ve stolen.
After 20 years of continuous, rapt attention, this garden has shown me its secrets, like the spot by the kitchen that’s warm enough to grow a peach tree outside, one that fruits like magic. Our garden has an intimidating number of walls, but I realised they were ideal heat traps for virtually anything planted against them: plums and raspberries, climbing hydrangeas and honeysuckle. Climbing roses became my special addiction and today they clamber everywhere.
Along with reading about gardening compulsively, I also threw myself into another task that keen gardeners will understand – how to make the photographs we take less disappointing. I saw an ad for the great Andrea Jones’s weekend masterclass out in Girvan when our kids were tiny; my husband said he’d hold the fort while I slipped away, and what an experience it was.
Andrea was the first of the professional garden photographers I studied under who helped me understand key concepts, like colour and framing and golden hour. Over the years my photography improved, and this year, in a fit of optimism, I sent some of my pictures to Gardeners’ World Magazine. It still doesn’t seem real, but I’m now one of just six finalists for Garden of the Year, and the only one in Scotland. This is not an outcome that my upside-down daffodils and I could’ve anticipated.
If you love gardens, the People’s Choice phase of Garden of the Year is now open for voting until 18 December 2025.
Vote now in BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine’s Garden of the Year
Come to our next open day - and why not open your own garden?
I hope you’ll come along when Mercat Cottage Garden opens next spring, which is also when BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine’s Garden of the Year competition begins again. Why not enter? You’ll be asked to send up to 10 of your best photographs. Don’t make my mistake: the first time I entered, I sent springtime photographs. Do your garden justice and send along the lushest, highest-summer photos you have, to show your garden in its best light.
The Garden of the Year, just like Scotland’s Gardens Scheme, is all about sharing your space and offering inspiration to others. Check the Scotland’s Gardens Scheme website on 1 January 2026 and dig into the list of gardens opening during the year. Are you a garden owner who’d like to open? There’s still time to do so as a pop-up – and no worries if your garden is small! Ours is around 150 square metres and is proof of how energetically the SGS welcomes small and urban gardens.
What I loved about opening with SGS was twofold: I raised urgently needed funds for my friend’s rare-disease charity and I got the chance to be part of Scotland’s wider, wonderful garden community. SGS handles everything from marketing and publicity to on-site insurance for your opening, and your nominated charity receives 60% of your takings -- a wonderful benefit.
Learn how you can open YOUR garden
Please don’t forget to vote in BBC Gardeners World Magazine’s People’s Choice Award -- vote before the closing date of 18 December 2025: https://www.gardenersworld.com/news/gardens-of-the-year-competition-2025-peoples-choice-vote/
Vote now in BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine’s Garden of the Year
