Autumn Colours in the Meadows

 After tutoring my Friday morning creative writing class, I usually walk through the Meadows, and today the cherry trees were as beautiful as they are, more famously, in Spring. 

 

The Sycamores are surrounded by their beautiful fallen leaves too

 

The Importance of Not by Dorothy Baird

 

Dorothy Baird is an Edinburgh based writer, who comes along to one of the writing groups I facilitate. She has published two collections of poetry and this newly published pamphlet was a winner in the 2024 Poetry Space Pamphlet competition. 

It's a beautiful wee selection of poetry about things that are missing, fading memories, lost loved ones, the empty nest and the Sycamore Gap, the last of which is reflected in the cover design by Hanni Shinton. Nature is essential in this collection, from the "squirrel that could clearly run the country / with its problem solving" (You Can't Stand in the Same River Twice) to the "blackbird in his widower's weeds" (Therapy of Vowels), the "otter, the seals and the sleek wheel of a porpoise turning in the blue" (A Small Life Against the Timeline of Everything) and skylarks singing in many poems. 

I was taken right back to my own childhood by "Memories are Lonely things to carry alone" with it's description of a child's den under a rhododendron bush, my childhood den was under a sycamore tree, that has since been removed from the garden I grew up in, just as the poet's rhododendron bush is no longer there. 

 There are moving poems here about her father's dementia and his difficulties coping with the social distancing imposed by COVID-19 lockdowns 

"On the way out, she opens the door
with her sleeve covered hand and smiles
across the distance he wants to close
and she has to maintain, pushing back
against thousands of years of evolution
and the magnetism of family"

Social Distancing 

But in all the grief and sadness, there is always solace and the comfort of nature, and "snowdrops / spread among the stones like small bulbs of hope" in the cemetery (Carpe Diem). 

This is a closely observed, acutely felt and beautifully written pamphlet.   

The Importance of Not by Dorothy Baird published (2025) by Poetry Space. 

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My latest Substack post 'Art and Activism', went up yesterday, you can read it here. 

Autumn Colours over the weekend

 On Saturday we walked round Saughton Park and in between the showers I captured some of the lovely autumn colours on camera

 The cherry trees look particularly beautiful at this time of year, especially when viewed in full sunshine against a clear blue sky  

Yesterday, I met a friend to go to the Resistance exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland Modern 2 Gallery. Described as  "How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest", it covers all types of British protests including environmental protests from early protests against birds being killed so their feathers could be used in hats (a protest which lead to the formation of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)); the 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout, highlighting the lack of public access to open spaces; and the 1971 Friends of the Earth Bottle Dump which protested the withdrawal of returnable bottles by a major drinks brand (you can read an excellent article here, about the legacy of that campaign). So it's well worth catching if you're in Edinburgh (it runs until early January.)

While I was waiting for my friend, I took some photos of the autumn colours in Dean Cemetery, which can be seen over the wall from the grounds of the art gallery

 

Stinkhorn by Sion Parkinson

 I attended an event at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival at which Sion Parkinson was speaking and I bought the book after the event. 

This beautifully illustrated book offers a fascinating and often eccentric look at the famously smelly group of fungi known as stinkhorns, a wider look at the relationships between smell and sound and the relationship between bad smells and epilepsy (which the author was diagnosed with a few years ago). The book takes in everything from natural history to the music of John Cage (who himself was fascinated by fungi).

The stinkhorn fungus itself is not only smelly but noisy. The reader's first reaction to that comment might be an impatient 'oh for goodness sake, fungi don't make noises' but "The audible hum in the space surrounding the stinkhorn does not, of course, resonate from the mushroom itself, but is the sound produced by a swarm of several species of fly that are almost always found about it. ... Houseflies hum not with their mouths but with the beating of their wings... in the key of F major. The noisier blowfly Collophora vicina one of the most frequent flies to visit the stinkhorn, flaps its wings at a more bassy .... pitch somewhere between D and D sharp".

This is one of the things I liked most about this book, the way it forces the reader to think about our senses differently. The occasional reaction of 'oh for goodness sake' quickly becomes 'wow, that's fascinating'. 

Stinkhorn by Sion Parkinson, published by Sternberg Press.  

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My latest Substack post 'Why Did I study Botany?' is now up! You can read it here.  

 

Customised Apron

This apron was in a bit of a state, the straps were worn and there were holes in it. So I decided to repair and upgrade it. I sewed brightly coloured patches over the holes, made new straps from the handles of a tote bag that I'd repurposed as a cushion cover and added a flowery pocket for good measure. 

 So now it looks better than ever and is even more practical, as I can store things in the pockets! 

Autumn Colours on Corstorphine Hill

 Yesterday we had a lovely walk, enjoying the autumnal colours of Edinburgh's Corstorphine Hill. 

I find autumnal colours tricky to capture effectively on camera, it really does depend on there being enough sunshine and for large parts of yesterday's walk thre was ample sunshine so some of the photos turned out quite well. 

At the top of Corstorphine HIll is the Corstorphine Tower, which was built by William MacFie of Clermiston as a memorial to Sir Walter Scott, in 1817, the hundredth anniversary of the author’s birth. The tower is open on Edinburgh's Doors Open Days and on Sunday afternoons during the summer, but for the rest of the year, you can only view the outside

Corstorphine Hill is well known for being a good place to find a variety of fungi, both edible and inedible. We found several Porcelain fungi on one tree and managed to get some photos, the best of which is below 

Other than the Porcelain fungi, we didn't see as many fungi as we might have hoped. We did however have a thoroughly enjoyable walk! 

Orison for a Curlew by Horatio Clare

 

The Slender-billed Curlew was officially declared extinct in 2024, with the IUCN listing updated on 10 October 2025. The next day I found this book in a charity book shop. 

In this book, Horatio Clare travels through Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania in search of the elusive Slender- billed Curlew, the last officially accepted sighting of which was in Hungary in 2001. 

The Slender-billed Curlew is "a species of curlew, plumaged in a blend of whites and golds, with dark spots on the flanks, slim and graceful of form, more refined than the plumpy common curlew, with a thinner, down-curving beak, which makes it look as though it is chewing a stem of grass". 

The author visits some of the places where this wader used to be seen and talks to people who have worked in conservation across the area, including Christian Mihai, a bird photographer, Petar Iankov of the Bulgrarian Society for the Protection of Birds (BSPB), Janos Berthond Kiss, who has been instrumental in developing environmental protection in the Danube Delta in Romania and Yannis Tsougrakis, a greek sustainability expert, who has the call of the Slender-billed Curlew as his ringtone on his mobile: "it rises and rises, a burbling ache, a fluting whistle with lament and wildness and defiance in it".

The Slender-billed Curlew favoured areas, such as the Danube Delta and the Evros Delta in Greece, which are severely hunted, though many are on paper protected, largely due to the rarity of the this species of curlew itself. Deltas are affected by rising sea levels and often also drained for agricultural expansion and polluted by industrial activities, which damages the ecology and fragments the remaining suitable habitat areas that aren't directly damaged. The degradation of these wetland areas is bad news for all species that live there, but particularly for rarities such as the Slender-billed Curlew. 

There are signs of hope, though no longer for the Slender-billed Curlew, now that it's been declared extinct. The BSPB has "persuaded the Bulgarian government to declare 30% of Bulgaria a Specially Protected Area under EU Law". An area of Burgas in Bulgaria, once home to the Slender-billed Curlew, before an oil refinery was built, has, since the refinery closed down, been restored and is now a nature reserve hosting 273 species of birds, though alas, not the Slender-billed Curlew. The author portrays the story of the Slender-billed Curlew as "a story of a great generation of conservationists. Their legacy, in protected areas, reserves, information centres, visitor numbers and the people they recruited and trained to continue their work, has a value which is incalculable".

However, though we need the optimism, we also need to pay attention to the loss of wetland habitats and the creatures that live there: 

"Perhaps this is a message from the Slender-billed Curlew,: the marshes, the soft overlaps of water and land, are shrinking. Human use leaves little room for environmental ambivalence.... If the coming hundred years see disputes over water usage in southern Russia, the Balkans, Europe or North Africa it may come to be said in hindsight, that the quiet, almost invisible fate of the Slender-billed Curlew was a sign of troubles to come".

Orison for a Curlew by Horatio Clare, illustrated by Beatrice Forshall, published (2017) by Little Toller Books.