PARADISE is lost. An ambitious plan to create a new national showpiece for Scotland is in crisis after an application for £25m of lottery funding was turned down.
The Calyx Project was to have been sited on a 61-acre site on the edge of Perth and was aimed at producing a Scottish rival to Kew Gardens or the Eden Project in Cornwall.
An application was made to the Living Landmarks programme, run by the Big
Lottery Fund (BLF), to distribute millions of pounds to suitable projects across the UK.
But although Calyx made a shortlist earlier this year, it was not included in the final three. A total of £70m was granted to three other projects, including £25m to The Helix, a huge environmental regeneration scheme in Falkirk.
The Calyx - total cost £36m - will not now go ahead, as the rest of the funding was conditional on the lottery grant. A search is being made for other sites in case the project can be rescued, but on a much smaller scale.
Its backers, including prominent Scottish businessmen, gardening celebrities and politicians from the area, have accused the BLF of misleading the bid team into thinking that a project that did not include a major element of land regeneration would stand a chance.
Jim McColl, Scotland's best-known TV gardener and star of BBC's Beechgrove Garden, said: "There is intense disappointment that the Calyx project did not appear to fulfil the Big Lottery Fund mould.
"The schemes that did get the money are driven by local councils, which is great for them, but obviously the BLF has gone for the safer option. I would argue that regeneration is what councils should be doing anyway, not relying on lottery funds."
The Calyx - the name of the petals surrounding a developing bud - would have been created largely on farmland to the southwest of Perth, joined to the site of the national heather collection at Cherrybank
Built as a series of themed areas, it was forecast to attract at least 250,000 visitors every year.
Roseanna Cunningham, the SNP MSP for Perth, said it was an "enormous disappointment" that the Calyx did not get through the lottery process, and added:
"If regeneration was the focus of Living Landmarks then that should have been made much clearer from the very start."
A spokeswoman for the Big Lottery Fund said:
"This has been a very competitive programme with a broad range of high-quality large-scale projects applying for funding. To make it to the latter stage has in itself been a tremendous achievement."
The full article contains 437 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
