Memorial seats in the public gardens of Scotland have moving, even unforgettable, stories to tell

Such an elegant little memorial, love garbed as wit, and it was easy to imagine Mr Broadbent, “a proper old gent” never without his trilby, according to the head gardener, visiting this beautiful spot and thinking of his late wife, whose maiden name had been Low, and whom one could almost see, thanks to the plaque, in her own youthful bloom.

Once I’d noticed the Greenbank bench, I started looking out for these tributes. They are everywhere in Scotland. On the lower slopes of The Cobbler, that well-loved mountain near the head of Loch Long, there is a bench dedicated to Tam McAulay, a passionate climber and relentless patter-merchant who died five years ago at the age of 60, swept over a waterfall on Rhum. His body was recovered by friends from the Creagh Dhu Mountaineering Club, and his ashes later scattered at Dumbarton Rock. The memorial was arranged by colleagues in the Arrochar mountain rescue.

That’s the thing about these benches – each one is a story, a life. In Edinburgh alone there are more than 1,500. Taking a stroll through Princes Street Gardens and reading the plaques is to brush briefly against the texture of many lives, and to get a strong sense of distances travelled, both temporal and physical. There are people who were born up a close during Victoria’s reign and died in America during that of the Beatles.

More moving than the stark dates of birth and death are the brief messages on the plaques, which make one understand that these were real people who took real pleasure in the place where they are now commemorated. “In memory of Tim Wright whose Scottish dance music was heard so often in the gardens,” it says on one bench overlooking the Ross Bandstand where, during the 1940s, Wright – a pianist – and his band would perform. Another, for Charles Doward Farquhar, who died in 1960, aged 70, notes that he was, “A lover of music and this grand scene.” I’d like to think he heard Tim Wright play.

Léan Scully, “who made a festival of this city”, is remembered on a bench in the gardens near the Royal Over-Seas League, the private members club where she stayed during her annual visits from Dublin during the festival, and from where she always watched the fireworks above the castle with a glass of champagne or crème de menthe to hand. On her death in 2007, aged 71, she left the Edinburgh International Festival a legacy of £3.66 million, a parting gift for the pleasure she had taken in so many classical concerts.

“She was a larger-than-life lady,” says Nicky Pritchett-Brown who was in charge of fundraising at the time. “She was fabulous and fun-loving and felt so at home here. I like to think she’s up there somewhere, looking down, and enjoying what’s going on at the festival now.”

Scully’s is a happy story, in its way, but there are sadnesses in the gardens, deep emotional shadows as if cast by a low winter sun. Dr Julian Roebuck was just 25 when he died in a car accident over 20 years ago. His bench is near the Ross Fountain, that elaborate gilded ornament depicting in female form the arts and sciences, two disciplines beloved of Roebuck, a scientist with BP who also played the French horn. His dad Martyn, now 74, talks about his son’s achievements with evident pride. They were friends as well as father and son, and were getting to know each other again after Julian’s years away at university.

He died on the evening of 24 January, 1990, driving back home to Edinburgh following a game of squash in Grangemouth. A sharp frost caused black ice on the M9. He skidded and collided with the crash barrier, the car turned over and was hit by another skidding vehicle. The black ice only lasted for three quarters of an hour, Martyn explains, and his son also had the misfortune to hit the end of the crash barrier, which was made of concrete; a little to the right and he might have survived. Martyn’s mind seems to snag on these facts, as if it were a matter of minutes and inches which killed his boy. “I don’t think I’ve ever got over it,” he says.

There are love stories here, too. James and Margaret Bryce, commemorated on a bench right in the shadow of the castle, were born and raised in Edinburgh then emigrated to Toronto where, eventually, they reached the end of their lives – she in 1979 from breast cancer; he in 2010, just two days shy of his 92nd birthday.

Jimmy, as he was known, was one of 11 children. At 17, he ran away and joined the RAF, spending the war as a navigator on Lancaster bombers. On leave, he met Margaret at the Palais de Dance in Tollcross, walked her home to 81 Gorgie Road, and they sat on the step outside the tenement getting to know each other. They married in 1944. Their daughter Patricia, who is now 66, makes a point of sitting on that step every time she is visits from Canada. This summer she will sit, for the first time, on her parents’ bench. “It means the world to me,” she says. “It’s in a spot that they both loved. They are together in their home.”

Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden is a special, soulful place in the city; visit early in the day and the only sounds are birdsong, leaves underfoot and the wind in the trees. In centuries past, the garden grew plants for use in medicine; now it acts as a sort of balm on city-scoured minds. People fall hard for the Botanics and it is little wonder that, after their death, so many are remembered here.

Maggie Stevenson, “who,” according to her plaque, “enjoyed the seasons”, died of cancer in 1997 aged 65. Born in Glasgow, she moved to Ghana with her husband and two young children in 1957. On the boat over, she met a man – Bill Stevenson – who was moving to the same town, Kumasi, to work as a literature lecturer. He became a friend of the family.

In 1959, Maggie’s husband and her six-year-old son died in a road accident. She returned to Scotland to raise her daughter, and some years later, she and Bill, by this time also living in Edinburgh, became a couple. In 1977, they married. They lived in a top floor flat off the Royal Mile, and Maggie – a keen gardener with no garden – became a Botanics regular. She especially liked to visit in winter to see the alpines. After her death, Bill – who had comforted her in her grief – found some comfort in his own by visiting the bench which bears her name.

George and Rena Petrie, commemorated on a bench beneath the spreading limbs of a Hungarian oak, lived for many years in a large sandstone house on the north-western corner of the Botanics; they had spent their childhoods living in the same street in Trinity. “Rest and be thankful,” it says next to George Petrie’s name and dates (1911-1997). This has a triple meaning – he is at rest, of course, and the passer-by is invited to rest; but it also refers to his passion for motor-racing. He honeymooned in Le Mans and was a keen spectator at the Rest And Be Thankful hill climb. He owned the first E-type Jag in Scotland. He was a master blender of whisky, famous for his nose. He kept secret recipes in his safe, the most prized being his recipe for Glayva. Rena (1912-2001) was an immensely strong woman, who married George in 1938, and cared for him when he developed Alzheimer’s. Theirs was not, according to the children, “a boring domestic saga”; though they were private, undemonstrative people, their depth of feeling for each other was obvious.

One of the most intriguing plaques in the Botanics commemorates James Robertson, a quantity surveyor, originally from Ayrshire, who died in 1997 aged 50 after suffering a brain haemorrhage: “Breathing in I am space/Breathing out I am free”. It is a Buddhist text, the choice of his friend Pat Piper. They had been close since the late 1970s, spending time together in the pub and at the pictures; for a while he rented a room in her Bruntsfield flat. It was the most important friendship of Pat’s life, and she cries a little when talking about him. They enjoyed walking in the Botanics, and would pause by Inverleith House with its vista of serried steeples and gables. “We used to sit looking over Edinburgh and put the world to rights,” she says.

I am sitting there while I finish this article. Twilight is coming on and it’s cold, but there is a tremendously warming feeling of communion – with Pat and Jim, and all the citizens who have taken pleasure in this place. All things must pass. This we know. But in the meantime, what could be better than to pass some of one’s own precious time on a comfortable bench, gazing out at a city full of stories, and loss, and love? «