Growing things in Shetland can be a struggle. The sun is low and often hides, it never gets particularly warm; even in bright light there’s a fierce spray of salt from the sea. This is what gives Shetland its barren beauty. Heather prevails.
Any visitor will notice the lack of trees, although a few small ‘woods’ have been planted in the recent past. It isn’t, as tourists and schoolchildren are dutifully told, because the Vikings arrived and sliced them all down for use in boat building and repairing. It’s because conditions are not ideal.
But it must be said, Shetland never really gets that cold in the winter either. The summer provides endless daylight. There are a few sheltered voes and valleys with astounding microclimates of their own, that seem to bathe in sun when it’s gone elsewhere and are well out of the prevailing wind.
My mother is the gardener in the family, though Dad likes to act like he is. He might aid in the growing of a few potatoes and put his back into digging them up when the house is empty, but otherwise he obeys conservative custom. I would like to claim I am an expert horticulturalist, but alas I am not. I judge vegetables by flavour and by the distance they’ve travelled to get to my plate. Handily, Mum’s veg wins on all accounts.
The obvious things do well: carrots, neeps (swedes for the English, turnips for the northern Scots) and tatties of many colours. Frosty winter vegetables: sprouts, cabbages, cauliflowers and endless, endless kale. We pretended to like it before it was cool.
Rhubarb is almost impossible to kill – and in fact our hundred-plus-year-old patch was recently entirely dug up and re-buried upside down for some building works. It came back the following year, bigger than ever. And in a similar vein, many Shetland gardens are covered in a very peppery rocket. It grows huge, is delicious and commands quite the price down south. But getting rid of it is a chore – try it in the pesto.
For stuff that grows outside in temperate England, Shetlanders need a polytunnel. Or a ‘polycrub’, which is an extra-sturdy Shetland version made of re-purposed salmon farms. A standard polytunnel has its downsides, as is evidenced by an enforced break in the photography for this book during which we were required to go help re-skin a polytunnel over in a particularly sheltered part of the mainland. Think of their plastic skin as a large kite, or sail.
In ours, we have had some unusual things. Raspberries and strawberries grow well. Next to them, you’ll find a bay tree, and an apple tree. In fact, as you might expect, the apple tree is growing through the roof. But it is producing apples, which cannot be said for any placed outside. Pumpkins, squashes and courgettes grow well.
For more exotic things – tomatoes, chillies or citrus fruits – a heated conservatory is preferred. Standalone glasshouses do exist but imagine what happens when one of those takes off…
I don’t care much about flowers, but I hear they do grow.
