2025/01/28 by Alec Finlay, Billy Lucas, Kirsty Jones +2 · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #History of Science and Natural History
paper · doi:10.2218/ed.9781836451174
openalex publication_date 2025/01/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Geoffrey Dutton (1924–2010) was a distinguished biomolecular scientist who was simultaneously also a poet, mountaineer, wild water swimmer, and the creator, caretaker and chronicler of a Highland garden in Perthshire, Scotland. Dutton saw no conflict between science and poetry, and eight acres of a steep and rugged hillside provided him with an experimental ground to explore this and other complex interrelationships in his search for the new. For fifty years, Dutton maintained what he called a ‘marginal garden’ – a marginal site guided with marginal effort to maximum marginal effect. His lifelong ecological dialogue with the garden was ahead of its time and is today largely forgotten, despite Dutton’s multiple publications in both prose and verse. Amid the garden’s slow transition back into the wild margin, this publication is a celebration – of a special place, a singular body of work and an insatiably curious individual.