Beautiful Scotland

Registration for Beautiful Scotland 2022 is now closed. Find out more and email to join our Beautiful Scotland family in 2023 (it's FREE to take part and we have a wealth of support, resources and recognition for your community)!

Here are our plans for this year:

It is important to understand that we don’t know what the COVID-19 situation will be through 2022. What follows is our present thinking, which we will develop in light of circumstances:

Beautiful Scotland will go forward as close to 2019 as possible e.g. the competition with two judges visiting, following social distancing measures.
A non-judged category is available for those groups who would like to remain part of our 'bloom' family and access the support, resources and recognition, but feel the competition element is too much for them.
There will be no fee for taking part in either the judged or non-judged categories.
We will repeat the support and resources that we provided through 2021.
Our priority is to your health and wellbeing, so it’s absolutely fine if you aren’t comfortable having judges visit or if you wish to be judged virtually; we will have suitable options to enable this.
Mentoring and support will be available to all groups.

The Beautiful Scotland awards gives us and our community a common goal to work towards, showing we care about where we live, and this national recognition really helps to keep us all motivated throughout the year. We really would encourage any group thinking about entering, either for the first time or following a break, to get involved – the friendly support network, inspiration and motivation it provides is invaluable!

Ray Theedam-Parry, Lauder in Bloom (read Lauder's inspiring journey from It's Your Neighbourhood to Beautiful Scotland).

Beautiful Scotland is a long-established community environmental improvement programme which we run in partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) under the Britain in Bloom campaign. Beautiful Scotland supports groups across Scotland as they seek to improve and enhance their local environment. The programme is for a whole village/town etc. In many cases, one group leads the entry, working in partnership with a wide range of other groups, organisations and the local authority. Beautiful Scotland is based on three pillars – with an extensive set of awards and certificates. [If you are part of a smaller scale group/project, why not take part in our sister initiative - It's Your Neighbourhood?]

in 2022, it is FREE to take part in Beautiful Scotland! Your group will benefit from access to support, networking, resources and national recognition from ourselves and from the RHS - find out more here.

Our optional theme for this year is the Year of Stories. Find out more.

Beautiful Scotland provides the Scottish entrants to the UK-wide Britain in Bloom competition, which is run by the RHS. The competition takes place between the regional and national winners in 17 areas – Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey and 12 English regions. The regional winners from any given year are entered into the UK-wide event for the following year.

Scotland has been extremely successful in Britain in Bloom in recent years, with at least one class winner in every year since 2005. Most impressively, Scottish entrants have won the highest Champion of Champion award four times from 2006-2019, with two successes for the large village of Falkland in Fife, one win for the small town of Alness in the Highlands and a win for Perth.

In its current and previous incarnations, Beautiful Scotland has been running for over 50 years. At its launch in 1967, ‘In Bloom’ was run by the then Scottish Tourist Board and supported by the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, and provided a platform for beautification of villages, towns and cities. The initial focus of the campaign was on horticulture, and while that remains a key theme there is now also a focus on environmental responsibility and community participation.

Beautiful Scotland has a sister programme – which we also run in conjunction with the RHS – called It’s Your Neighbourhood. This is a non-competitive, and is designed to attract volunteer-led community groups who wish to clean and beautify their local neighbourhoods - whether through, for example, community allotments, Friends of Parks groups, after-school clubs, adopting a piece of derelict land. Read more about it It's Your Neighbourhood.