vi: In Focus
In gratitude for Geddes and gardens Elaine MacGillivray In 2016, the National Gardens Scheme commissioned the King’s Fund to write an independent report on the benefits of gardening and health. This led to the publication of David Buck’s Gardens and health: implications for policy and practice, in which he argues that: Increasing people’s exposure to, and use of, green spaces has been linked to long-term reductions in overall reported health problems (including heart disease, cancer and musculoskeletal conditions)… Gardens can provide other important environmental functions, such as reducing flood risk and moderating climate and pollution, which have knock-on benefits for health (Buck, 2016). While there is a growing body of scientific data to support the individual, public and environmental health benefits of gardens and gardening, particularly in relation to an increasingly urbanised society, these ideas are not new. Over a century ago, gardens and gardening were central to the philosophies of Scottish biologist, sociologist, urban planner, environmental movement pioneer, and one of the most innovative social thinkers of his
to which my mother was devoted (Defries, 1928). His formal education began at Perth Academy; he went on to study biology and evolutionary theory at the Royal College of Mines under the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), and to the Sorbonne, Paris, where he studied with French biologist, anatomist and zoologist, Félix Joseph Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers (1821-1901) at his marine station at Roscoff in Brittany. In France, he was exposed to the work of French social theorists Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who championed the interconnectedness of the city and its region; Le Play’s concept of ‘Lieu, Travail, Famille’ (‘Place, Work, Family’) was to be a profound inspiration. In 1879, Geddes spent a year in Mexico collecting specimens, returning in 1880 to teach biology at the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter, he held the Chair of Botany at the University of Dundee, and in 1919 was appointed the inaugural Chair of Sociology and Civics at the University of Bombay, India. During his lifetime he contributed civic surveys and town planning reports to Edinburgh, Dublin, Tel Aviv, and over thirty cities in India. He remained in India until 1924, before removing to Montpellier,
time— Professor Sir Patrick Geddes (18541932). Patrick Geddes was born in Ballater, Aberdeenshire, on 2 October 1854. He spent his formative years at Mount Tabor, a cottage on the side of Kinnoull Hill overlooking Perth. There, in its hillside cottage garden, Geddes received practical instruction from his father on the art and value of gardening. He later wrote: I can see my main good fortune lay before school days in a home modest enough in ordinary ways, but with a large garden; —ample fruit-buses, apples and great old wild cherry trees; with vegetables mainly cared for by my father, and a fair variety of flowers,
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