The message
from Stephen Henning contains these words:

Janet Baraclough wrote:

contains these words:
Ericacious plants are not salt tolerant at all. Azaleas are in that
group.

Well, that just ain't so. Much of west Scotland is acid peaty soil,
lashed by salty rain and salt-laden wind. Some of the commonest
naturalised plants are ericaceous. Heather and rhododendron ponticum
both thrive right down to the (salt)water edge here. Pieris, and
deciduous and evergreen azaleas do very well, and it's common for very
wind (and salt) swept gardens to have huge old deciduous azaleas as a
windbreak on the sea side. West Scotland's salt-laden coast is famous
for its rhododendron gardens .

I spent most of the month of May visiting Scotland's famous rhododendron
and azalea gardens and none grew rhododendrons nor azaleas near the open
sea or near the beaches.

Garbage. If you were ever here, you never looked at a map.


The rhododendron and azalea gardens I visited
we

Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh (not near the sea)

I suggest you look at the atlas. Edinburgh is a SEAPORT.

Inverewe Gardens (NT) (on Loch Ewe, a sal****er estuary, but the
rhododendrons and azaleas are either grown in walled gardens or on high
ground. In their official brochure they describe the "curse of the salt
spray")

Lochewe is a seabay, a fjiord. Open to the Atlantic Ocean. Look at
that atlas again. Few if any of the rhodos there are in the sun-facing
walled garden which was built for herbaceous and vegetable gardening.

Arduaine Gardens (NT), Inveraray (on a high slope overlooking the Sound
of Jura.)

Arduaine is at sea level on the west coast, NOT at Inveraray.

Benmore Gardens (RBG), Benmore (a woodland setting not near the sea)

Where do you GET this garbage?????? Benmore is in a woodland setting
at Dunoon on the Holy Loch; where the US Navy used to keep its
submarines.

Crarae Gardens (NT), Inveraray (on the Crarae Burn (a fresh water creek)
not near the sea)

Crarae (I work there too) is right on Loch Fyne, another sea
inlet/fjiord. The freshwater burn through the garden runs into the sea.

Brodick Castle & Gardens, Isle of Arran (on an island on the Firth of
Clyde, but it is situated high not near the sea)

This is hilarious. I live on Arran in Brodick, I work in Brodick
Castle Gardens.The castle is 100 ft above SEAlevel, and less than 100
m from the water. The rhododendrons and azaleas are between the castle
and the sea. As I type I am looking across the SEA bay to Brodick
Castle and its gardens which run right down to the SEAwater. Many of the
most important rhodos in the garden grow (and self-seed) in the section
called "Plant hunter's walk", which is right down at sea level maybe 10
m from the water.

Not many Scots consider ponticum a garden plant.

Haven't said they do. Rp is a naturalised and highly invasive weed
throughout west Scotland, right down to the sea edge. (The gardens you
list grow far more than ponticum of course.). Yellow azalea is also a
naturalised weed in many west coastal areas, which is why I mentioned
it.

The Scots have done
considerable research on the resistance of plants to the salt spray and
to limestone. They have found plants which can tolerate these notorious
enemies of rhododendrons and azaleas.

The rhododendron gardens of the west coast of Scotland are all on
acid soils, not limestone. Rhododendrons, because of their resistance
to salt, are often used as wind-shelter belts in the coastal gardens you
mention.

Janet

Isle of Arran, west coast of Scotland.