I have been wishing to write this post for a while now. It is about the life of John Halliday who was described as “a poet as well as a gardener”. John Halliday was born in Upper Teviotdale in 1820, but as a young man settled in Bridge of Allan and lived through the transitions of a village into the ‘Queen of Scottish Spas‘.
In July 1855, Charles Rogers introduced John Halliday as ‘The Poet of Bridge of Allan’: 
John Halliday was just 27 years old when this volume of poetry was published:
This is one of the poems:
September 1855:
May 1859:
25 January 1859, John Halliday sings one of his own songs:
September 1866: flowers give way to people: 
John Halliday was a keen fisherman and was the go-to person for fishing advice. This Stirling Observer report is from September 1875:
Two summers later, the same paper reports:
John Halliday survived his wife by 25 years. He died at the Castle Hotel, Stirling Castle Esplanade, in January of 1902.
For all his adult life Queen Victoria had been Monarch.
He was buried beside his wife in Logie Churchyard.
It took 15 years before there was any written account of the life of John Halliday ‘poet and gardener’ [this was published in the Borders Chronicle, March 1917]:
