The Friary Community Garden, just off Queen Street, is run by unpaid helpers who give up their time to work in the green space, which provides therapeutic gardening sessions to senior citizens and people with disabilities.

However over the past couple of weeks, mindless yobs have trashed the cabin, tore up flowers and flooded the beds, just days before inspectors arrived for a Beautiful Fife judging competition.

Linda Muir, garden co-ordinator, was disgusted with the vandalism.

“It makes you sick,” she said. “It’s just rotten. Our volunteers work so hard and have given hundreds of hours to make this a place to enjoy.

“It’s malicious, deliberate damage. They should be ashamed of themselves.

“People have asked me, ‘Does it not make you feel like giving up?’ But I said no, because this is a very valuable place.

“We have a quite unique therapeutic community garden run by volunteers, providing a beautiful social space where people can enjoy the view.

“It offers therapeutic gardening to people who have mild disabilities, amputees, senior citizens and more. It something valued by many people.” The vandalism occurred over several days last week, and Linda explained what they’d had to deal with.

“Apart from the occasional theft, where we’ve had folding chairs or ornaments stolen, we’ve had the volunteers’ cabin broken into, trashed and windows smashed as well as malicious damage to the flowers,” she said.

“The entire water supply, which volunteers had laboriously filled, was emptied out and flooded the flower beds with several gallons of water.

“We need to teach children to value growing plants, trees, flowers and vegetables.” To make matters worse, the damage came just days before judges arrived for the Beautiful Fife awards, meaning that Linda needed to rope off parts of the garden that had been ruined.

“They were very sympathetic about the mess I had to rope off,” she said. “We won’t know the results for weeks but they were very impressed with the rest of the garden, luckily they were quite enchanted with it!

“Now we’ll repair what we can this week when the volunteers are in.”