Saughton Park

Yesterday while we were walking along the Water of Leith from the Visitor Centre on Slateford Road to Roseburn, we took a detour round the lovely gardens at Saughton Park. We particularly loved this bed of flowers, a lively mix of native and garden species and obviously popular with the local bees and hoverflies! Updated to add: This flower bed was planted by a group of adults who have learning or physical disabilities from the Craighall Day Centre. They have been working at Saughton for a few years and also plant up the 200m wild flower border on the side side of garden as well as grow a range of vegetables in the secret courtyard.

We were also intrigued by the teddy bears in the greenhouses. Updated to add: The bears were part of the Great Saughton Bear Hunt event which took place in July and which saw 350 people go mad looking for the 30 bears which had taken up residence in the Garden. They are all named after Parks and Greenspace staff, DJ being the Parks and Greenspace Manager!

As it was such fun we are having another Great Saughton Bear Hunt on 16th October - 10.00 til 4.00. It's free and all are welcome!

There are lots of pretty flowers in the greenhouses

though sadly a lot of them are infested by aphids and what look like scale bugs (though I could be wrong with the id on these)

Good news for the park is that the Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded the City of Edinburgh Council funds to develop detailed plans to restore and improve Saughton Park (which will hopefully include funds for environmentally friendly pest control in the green houses). They are looking for people who visit Saughton Park to take part in a survey to help them develop these plans.

Updated to add:  There is a Friends of Saughton Park meeting on Thursday 4th September - 7.00pm in the Winter Garden and any interested in the Park is most welcome to come along.

Thanks to Pete McDougall, Saughton Park Development Officer for the updates to this post.

As ever, red text contains hyperlinks that take you to other erbpages where you can find out more.

Water of Leith

Today we walked the stretch of the Water of Leith downstream from the Visitor Centre to Roseburn.

There were plenty of hoverflies around, like these two on a dandelion flower

and several trees had galls growing on them (galls are the plant's reaction when wasps lay eggs in the plant), like these on an oak tree

and these on a willow tree

I was delighted to find this group of cuckoo pints in berry

and I'll need to remember to go back in spring time to photograph them in their arum stage. There are lots of individual cuckoo pints in Colinton Dell (the area of the Water of Leith that I help to look after in my voluntary work) but I never see them as arums. Hopefully this group will be easier to find!

I was also pleased to find this clump of nettles, clearly showing the difference between the stinging nettles (on the left, with the greenish flowers) and the white dead nettles (on the right). Their leaves are superficially similar but they're not related plants and the whilte dead nettle doesn't sting!

We also walked round Saughton Park, but I'll blog about that separately tomorrow - it looks like Saughton Park has an exciting future ahead!

Latest earrings

These are three of the latest pairs of earrings I've made

the earrings in the middle are for a friend, the orange ones and pink ones are in the Crafty Green Poet Etsy shop. 

All are made using new nickel free silver earring hooks and beads and charms from my stash, though I bought the crackled stars new from the Number One Bead Shop, as there had been just a couple of these stars in the starter kit I got when I attended the jewellery making workshop there.

The Guga Stone by Donald S Murray and Douglas Robertson

St Kilda, the most remote island in the British Isles is uninhabited now, but is full of mythology surrounding the people who used to live there, before they were removed from their homes and resettled in other places across Scotland and beyond.

The Guga Stone is Donald S Murray's attempt to question the mythology, by rewriting some of the accepted truths about the island and inventing some mythologies all of his own. The result is a collection of stories and poems, which are by turn entertaining, exasperating and moving. The beautiful line illustrations by Douglas Robertson are a delight throughout the book.

It is entertaining trying to work out which stories are based in fact (I'm pretty sure the slippers made from gannets are real, as is the island's overall reliance on hunting seabirds) and which are false (I know for a fact there was never a goth culture on St Kilda, though the description of the island's goths is striking and apt:

Some thought they resembled cormorants 
with hair permanently tufted by the wind.

from Youthful Fashions on Hiort)

Some stories are much more hard to pin down and it in a sense doesn't matter. After all, isn't everything most of us know about St Kilda based on myths and misunderstandings? Yes, but sometimes I felt some of these pieces were perhaps too flippant. After all, though it is fun to play around with myths, it was a great tragedy that happened to the St Kilda community, one that Murray captures beautifully in Storm Petrel:

After the islanders were gone
storm petrels were no longer
guided ashore by psalms.

Ultimately this book that tells us more about how we see the world through myths, than it does about St Kilda itself. 

The Guga Stone by Donald S Murray, with illustrations by Douglas Robertson, published by Luath Press.

Liking lichens and watching birds

Lichens are fascinating! This xanthoria parietina is growing on the sea wall at Musselburgh.

The velvet scoters are back for the season on the water, such wonderful ducks with their fabulously weird faces. Swimming alongside them were two red necked grebes. I was also delighted to notice on the Musselburgh Boating Pond that there's now a family of little grebes, with five youngsters! The adults are just themselves small bundles of fluff, so you can imagine how cute the youngsters are! Then on the lagoons, along with several other birds, I was very happy to see several ruffs are still around. I'm beginning to think they may be here for the winter season, as they used to be many years ago.

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Meanwhile, I've added a photo of canal boats on the Union Canal to the downloadable photos section of the Crafty Green Poet Etsy shop.

Ice Bucket Challenge

Ice Bucket Challenge -

reservoirs dry up across

California.

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Yes, charities need to find imaginative ways to raise money for their vital work. However to me, the Ice Bucket Challenge sums up in some senses how profoundly disconnected we are from the environment. Yes, let's throw water at each other, while all across the world people lack drinking water and one of the richest places in the world is experiencing severe drought (and people in that very place continue to take part in the Ice Bucket Challenge!).

Meanwhile, here is a good article from another perspective about why charities shouldn't need to resort to gimmicky fundraising such as the Ice Bucket Challenge. 

in Gaza, where people are very aware of how precious a resource water is, they have started doing the Rubble Bucket Challenge to raise awareness of the poor living conditions in Gaza.

and in India, one woman has set up the Rice Bucket Challenge, in which you give a bucket of rice to a poor family. 

Tree Following End of Summer

The larch tree is still green and the new cones still look young

the elder bush that grows just under the larch is now in fruit, though the berries aren't ripe yet

the sycamore tree near the larch has got tar spot

 Tar spot is an unsightly fungus, but doesn't seem to affect the health of the tree. OPAL are asking people to take part in their tar spot survey.

On the other side of the river the hornbeam trees are coming into their most beautiful time of year, their chandeliers are starting to turn yellow

Meanwhile, I've added another photo to the downloadable photo section of the Crafty Green Poet Etsy shop.