September Sunshine at Edinburgh Botanics

We had some nice trips out last week during our staycation week and I'll blog about some of the them in the next few days. But today I'll share some photos from yesterday's visit to Edinburgh Botanic Gardens.

The weather was beautifully warm and sunny and we spent longer than usual in the gardens. There's always plenty to see but we were particularly interested to see the Edible Gardening display plots, neat the renovated Botanic Cottage, which is an area of the gardens we don't visit as frequently as we do many of the other areas. The plots, many managed by students at the Botanic Gardens are looking wonderful at the moment

Several of the students have patches of wildflowers in amongst the vegetables

some of the sunflowers are well past their best but some are still glorious

and the whole area was buzzing with bees and hoverflies like this Syrphus sp hoverfly

a few butterflies were still flying round, including this painted lady

 while a scarecrow watches over everything

Escaping from the heat of the open garden we followed the Scottish tree trail

and visited the Chinese pond

there were no birds on this pond, but the other pond had a lively family of moorhens (thanks to Crafty Green Boyfriend for this photo of a very cute young moorhen)

In the cafe this young herring gull was pestering its parent

while a dunnock crept unobtrusively round the tables looking for crumbs (thanks to Crafty Green Boyfriend for this photo too)

So we had a lovely walk round.

The bright sunshine was great for creating lovely shadows on the buildings round Edinburgh, so I posted some 'Shadow Shot Sunday' photos on my Shapeshifting Green blog here.