It's all in the genes

As well as honouring her family’s history of plant breeding, the artist and garden designer Caroline Thomson has created a remarkable garden

- Caroline Donald

THE best gardens are those that add up to more than the sum of their parts and this is especially so at Backhouse Rossie in Fife, home to Caroline and Andrew Thomson since 2005. On one level, visitors can wander happily through the 10 acres of walled garden and woodlands; dig a little deeper, however, and you find art, science, history and horticulture are represented here in happy coalescence.

Perhaps the most striking manifestation of such thoughtfulness is the wide path that crosses the 1½-acre walled garden from east to west. It represents the double helix of DNA, using granite setts recycled from the streets of Edinburgh (an hour to the south), after they were removed during works on the city’s new tram system. The background is filled in with crushed white cockle shells, which refer to Cave 13b in South Africa, where the presence of discarded shells is regarded as one of the earliest signs of civilisation. On a more personal note, the couple’s son Hamish was surfing nearby at the time, so their use was a reminder of him.