Edinburgh Botanic Gardens in changeable weather

Today we at last had rain that lastest for more than a few minutes thus properly breaking the longest hot dry spell in Scotland since 1961. (We can expect more such hot dry spells in the future as climate change makes such extreme weather more likely). Given the rain we decided to go to Edinburgh Botanic Gardens to see the exhibitions.

The first exhibition is The Edinburgh Shoreline bringing together thoughts from people who live and work along Edinburgh's Shoreline and naturalists and scientists (I took part in an interview for this project last year and blogged briefly about it here). It's an interesting exhibition bringing together photos, maps, beautiful artworks and knitted sea creatures

to provoke thought about what the shoreline means to us. The exhibition is on until 23 September and links up with the Edinburgh Shoreline project.

The second exhibition is The Lost Words which features artwork by Jackie Morris and poetry spells by Robert MacFarlane to highlight words that are no longer commonly featured in children's stories, lives and dictionaries. This exhibition is on in the Inverleith House until 2 September and ties in with the book The Lost Words.

After seeing these exhibitions we were able to enjoy a sunny walk round the gardens. We saw a family of goldcrests, one of which came incredibly close to us, but was difficult to photograph

I have never seen so many marmalade hoverflies as we saw today everywhere in the gardens

There were several other hoverflies too including this pied hoverfly

and this Myathropa florea

Several small white butterflies too

and let's not forget the bees, this is either a white tailed bumble bee or a buff tailed, I can never actually tell the difference!