I Call It a ‘Garden’, a Place of Seeds: Geoffrey Dutton’s Lessons in Curiosity and Exploration

Barbara Prezelj; Alec Finlay; Billy Lucas; Kirsty Jones; George Logan; Domen Finžgar; Geoffrey Dutton

doi:10.2218/ED.9781836451174

I Call It a ‘Garden’, a Place of Seeds: Geoffrey Dutton’s Lessons in Curiosity and Exploration

Authors

Barbara Prezelj, ESALA, ECA, University of Edinburgh; Alec Finlay; Billy Lucas; Kirsty Jones; George Logan; Domen Finžgar; Geoffrey Dutton

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/ED.9781836451174

Keywords:

Marginal garden, Druimchardain, Geoffrey Dutton, ecological dialogue, gardening, Scottish Highlands

Synopsis

Geoffrey Dutton (1924–2010) was a distinguished biomolecular scientist who was simultaneously also a poet, mountaineer, wild water swimmer, and the creator, caretaker and chronicler of a Highland garden in Perthshire, Scotland. Dutton saw no conflict between science and poetry, and eight acres of a steep and rugged hillside provided him with an experimental ground to explore this and other complex interrelationships in his search for the new. For fifty years, Dutton maintained what he called a ‘marginal garden’ – a marginal site guided with marginal effort to maximum marginal effect. His lifelong ecological dialogue with the garden was ahead of its time and is today largely forgotten, despite Dutton’s multiple publications in both prose and verse. Amid the garden’s slow transition back into the wild margin, this publication is a celebration – of a special place, a singular body of work and an insatiably curious individual.

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References

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