In an attempt to fill the void she soon began planning a garden that would celebrate and commemorate her son’s life.

Sam Macdonald, who was 15 at the time of his brother’s death, remembers that Betty’s interest in the garden became an important focus and distraction from pain.

‘My mother’s desire to create a garden was her way of coming to terms with the tragedy,’ he says. ‘She was agnostic but found spiritual comfort in creating the garden of remembrance. Plants were solicited at Angus’s memorial service and these plants became the foundation plants.’

The family, who were living in Surrey at the time of Angus’s death, returned to Scotland and Betty identified an undulating nine-acre site on a family-owned hill farm near Taynuilt in Argyll. Here, inspired by the great gardens of the west coast, she planned a woodland garden planted with hybrid rhododendrons surrounding a man-made loch named Angus’s Loch.

‘From an early stage Betty wanted to develop the idea of an improved landscape,’ Sam explains. ‘She didn’t want any formal beds or herbaceous plantings. She wanted to create a natural, tranquil environment.’

It was not all plain sailing. The site was just a bare, windswept ridge open to all the elements with access only possible on foot. Minimal shelter was provided by the occasional oak and a few indigenous birch and willow trees resulting in what Sam describes as ‘some tremendous disappointments – because of the exposed conditions 40 per cent of the original plantings died within the first three years.’

Betty, an American citizen, who had no previous experience of gardening in Scotland, slowly began planting sorbus, oak, birch and larch on the south and east side of the site creating a sheltered microclimate, which eventually allowed a collection of North American

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