Features / ‘It’s good for the soul’: Lea Gardens ready to turn over new leaf
LINDA Gray should be daunted. She has a to-do list that could unfurl and wind its way around the near two acre site at Lea Gardens, her slice of gardening paradise in the heart of Tresta in Shetland’s West Mainland.
There are paths to clear, weeds to pull up and fallen trees to be removed.
And yet – just over a week before she welcomes an eager public back – Gray surveys her serene slice of paradise and says she could not have it any better.
“A lot of folk say it must be so much hard work, but I never really feel like it’s work,” she said.
“I find it very therapeutic. I enjoy it.
“It’s good for the soul.”
If anyone should know, it is Gray. She has been working as a counsellor and psychotherapist for over 20 years, formerly from her office in Lerwick before moving to her new home in Tresta.
Now she wants to share her idyllic garden and its vast array of plants and trees with those in therapy, to hopefully give them the same joy she pulls from it every day.
Lea Gardens is perhaps Shetland’s most famous garden, honed and perfected for decades by Rosa Steppanova and James Mackenzie and enjoyed by countless visitors from 1977 until the pair put it on the market in 2022.
At one point it was home to around 1,700 different species – all requiring different levels of care and attention – which is a staggering amount of upkeep for anybody.
Gray is now its appreciative caretaker, having bought the four-bedroom home and its large expanse in January 2023.
Leading Shetland News through its twists and turns, she explained why she decided to take on such a gargantuan project.
A love of gardening blossomed while working in her grandparent’s garden in Vementry, and she said she had always wanted to be able to work with people outside when she became a therapist.
“I’d been here doing gardening work before,” she explained.
“I was here for a summer sometime in the early 1990s.
“Everything was perfect then. It was more like a botanical garden.”
When Lea Gardens went up for sale in 2022, Gray seized the opportunity with both hands.
“I thought, ‘this is the chance of a lifetime really’.
“I just went for it, like a crazy person,” she laughs.
Lea Gardens – for the uninitiated – is every bit as impressive as you might have heard, seen or read, a sprawling spread of trees from countries as far flung as Chile among a staggering collection of plants.
Every turn in the garden is a sensory surprise, a burst of colours around one and a myriad of pleasant smells round the next.
Gray says that, despite her horticultural mastery, the whole episode so far has been a steep learning curve.
“Some stuff I don’t know as much about, so I’ve been trying to read up about it and find what can I learn.
“Being a Shetlander I have more experience working with plants rather than trees.
“A lot of them are rare, or certainly rare to Shetland.
“Every day is a school day and every day is different.”
Lea Gardens is Gray’s, but to many in Shetland it will feel like a shared ownership.
Hundreds – if not thousands – of people will have fond memories of visiting the splendour of a garden that almost feels like it should be situated somewhere more exotic.
Gray knows that only too well, saying that folk had been “asking all the time” when they could come in and see it.
After holding off for almost 28 months, she is now about to invite people in for the very first time under her stewardship – on Sunday 27 April, between 10am and 4.30pm.
“It feels a bit daunting,” she laughs.
“It feels a long way from being ready for opening. But so many folk want to see it open because it’s been such a long time. It’s really been since Covid.
“It’s going to take a couple of years to get it back to its best. It’s going to be a massive weedathon this year.”
Shetland News is visiting Lea Gardens a day after Gray announced it would be opening at the end of April. Already she jokes: “I don’t know what I was thinking when I posted that!”
She has a “five-year plan” for getting Lea Gardens back to its best, which is only in its infancy, but admits she is ready to accept it is “never going to be perfect”.
Those plans were derailed by a number of trees being felled by seriously strong winds in the winter of 2023 – one of which would have smashed through her home if it had fallen in a different direction.
“The whole priority list had to change then,” Gray said.
“We had to cut them down. It’s devastating having to take down mature trees, but there’s nothing else you can do.”
She details her grand plans as we meander through the maze – a “peerie old” stone crofthouse with a roof could be used to grow artichokes and a bridge could be built to help people flow through another section.
One popular piece of the garden is a large pond which has homed a number of frogs recently, another new experience for Gray to wrap her head around.
“We had a pond when I was a bairn, but that was a tiny pond, so I’ve been having to do a lot of research on it,” she said.
“I’d like a peerie fountain to give it some movement, but it’s hard to find one – they all seem to have colours and lights.”
Pointed out by Shetland News this could give Lea Gardens a blast of Las Vegas glitz, Gray agrees – and says that is the exact opposite thing she is aiming for.
Another hopefully returning feature is a “Tresta rainbow trail”, which saw primulas grown and arranged to form rainbow colours in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ movement.
That is a holdover from Rosa and James’ time pruning and maintaining Lea Gardens, when it was regarded as one of the best gardens in the north of Scotland.
Gray said Rosa was still helping her – through her books.
“There is a lot of good information in Rosa’s books,” she said.
“There was also a lot of information left in the house.
“I came along before I bought the house and we went through the upper part of the garden, I videoed it and they told me about the plants.
“I planned to come back and go through the next part of the garden but the weather just got worse and worse.
“There’s some things I can piece together. When I post photos of things on Facebook I say, ‘I think it’s this, but I could be wrong’.”
Gray has a garden that would be every therapist’s dream right on her door step now, and says that Lea Gardens has been like therapy to her.
She hopes that any of her clients who want to get outside into it will find it just as helpful as she has.
“I have done some work outside with folk but I’m hoping this year will be the proper beginning of that,” she said.
“It just depends on the weather and what people want – some people want to be outside and some folk dinna.”
She never shies away from the size of the task in front of her, amounting that it will be a “significant” amount of “back-breaking work”.
But she adds: “If I can break the back of it this year, so to speak, it will just be upkeep after that.”
Lea Gardens will be open on Sundays from 10am to 4.30pm, with a plant sale on 27 April.
There will be no plant sale on the Sundays that follow.
Gray said she would be welcoming people in for just one day a week, but hopes to expand that later.
“We’ll just see how it goes this year,” she said.
“I hope to open more than one day another year.”
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