Restalrig Cemetery

Restalrig Cemetery is found in the churchyard of St Margaret's Church, at the centre of the tiny but picturesque Restalrig village, an area that has been entirely absorbed by the surrounding residential areas of Edinburgh including Restalrig and Lochend. 

 

Also in the churchyard is St Triduana's Chapel, 

 

an unusual hexagonal chapel and wellhousedating to the 1400s and named for a Pictish saint St Triduana 

said to have been blinded and martyred in the AD 500s. Holy water from a spring here was believed to cure eye ailments. You can read more about St Triduana and her connection to Restalrig here. 

Of course, I was visiting this cemetery to carry out a wildlife survey, continuing my enjoyable job of surveying the wildlife of all the council owned cemeteries in Edinburgh. Restalrig Cemetery is a small cemetery, with only a few trees, so it isn't particularly rich in wildlife. It does have some nice tree stumps, which are great habitat for species such as this turkey tail fungus 

and some nice mosses, including this wall screw moss (Tortula muralis) (I may be wrong on which species this is, so please feel free to correct me!)

What the Owl Taught Me by Annest Gwilym

  

I was delighted to be asked to review What the Owl Taught Me, the latest poetry collection from Annest Gwilym. It is broadly based on the idea of a bestiary (a treatise on various kinds of animal, especially a medieval work with a moralizing tone). Here there are beautifully written, closely observed poems about animals living, extinct and imaginary, in all the moods that nature shows us.

These poems are full of vivid imagery e.g. great crested newts are described as 'little stegosaurus', the echolocation of  pipistrelle bats as 'flittermice click songflights' and a grey heron as 'grey gauntness with a stalking walk'.

Nature is not all sweet and pretty and this collection doesn't shy away from the dark side, including The Nightmare Bird which is described as: "Gunmetal-feathered, earthquake-eyed, / ice-pick taloned". The nightmare bird is an imaginary creature, as is The Blackheart Malatrix, though I had to do a quick internet search on that, as it sounds so convincingly like the name of some obscure moth species! The malatrix comes across as quite endearing: 

"[I] walk in and out of your dreams colour them magenta
insert my proboscis into the tired hearts of petunias"

The poetry here is consistently lyrical, which makes the poems that deal with issues all the more powerful. The Last Woolly Mammoth is a poignant remembrance of a lost species and is followed in the collection by The First Mammophant, which imagines the first successful reintroduction into the wild of a recreated mammoth born from a host elephant's womb (this is a real possibility, see this article). She Waits, about a vixen waiting for her partner to return makes a stronger point against fox hunting than any number of political polemics. 

This is a beautifully written collection of nature poetry that will stay in the reader's mind long after reading and will repay repeated reading.

What the Owl Taught Me by Annest Gwilym published (2020) by Lapwing Publications.  

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Tree Following December update

For Tree Following this year I'm following one of the several wonderful old silver birch trees in North Merchiston Cemetery in Edinburgh. Crafty Green Boyfriend and I started walking round this cemetery (and the nearby Dalry Cemetery) every day for our #DailyExercise during the first UK lockdown last year. And we're still doing the same walk regularly, though currently I'm spending time visiting other cemeteries as I'm doing wildlife surveys there for the City of Edinburgh Cemeteries department. And in fact over the last month, I seem to have taken exactly no photos of my birch tree! 

Yesterday, however, I visited East Preston Street cemetery, which has several lovely birch trees. So here is a selection of photos of those birches:

one (but only one!) of the trees has a lot of witches' brooms in it. 

 

These growths can be caused by a variety of things, most usually fungi, bacteria or viruses, although they can be caused by insects (you can read more about witches brooms on the Woodland Trust website here).

East Preston Street Cemetery

I'm continuing my job of making wildlife surveys of all the council managed cemeteries in Edinburgh. Today I visited East Preston Street Cemetery which has excellent views to the nearby Arthur's Seat. 

It's an open cemetery with a few trees, mostly silver birches (in fact, these silver birches will make a guest appearance in my next Tree Following update, which is due in the next day or so)

The skeleton trees look very dramatic in the winter light

I couldn't see any major damage from the recent stormy weather, though it had brought down a lot of twigs and small branches from the trees. This actually had the advantage of making it much easier to find lichens, look at the selection on this twig! 

There's sunburst lichen (Xanthoria parietina), a camouflage lichen (Melanelixia sp), Leconora sp and others. One of the things that I'll be recommending at the end of my survey work is that next year the council employs a specialist lichenologist to survey all the cemeteries. Edinburgh's graveyards contain a wealth of lichens, and I don't know anywhere near enough about them to do more than scratch the surface in terms of surveying them!

I was impressed by this gravestone, which commemorates Jean Lorimor (known as Chloris in the poetry of Scotland's bard Robert Burns). The quote above the bird 'Wood Notes Wild' comes from John Milton's poem L'Allegro.

The quote at the bottom of this section of the stone reads: 'Better a Wee Bush than nae Bield' (Bield is a Scots word for shelter). This is an old Ayrshire saying that is attributed to Robert Burns and is the motto of the Burns family.

A Greener Way of Wrapping Gifts

For those who celebrate Christmas, it's time to start wrapping Christmas gifts!  

 Consumers in the UK use 227,000 miles of wrapping paper each year.(Statistic from the Rubbish Project on Twitter).

My family has always reused Christmas wrapping paper when giving gifts within the close family. However, people outside the close family, unless they're keen on recycling themselves, may be less than impressed by obviously reused paper. So how about some more imaginative ways to reuse paper in eye-catching ways? These are examples of fancy reused wrapping I've used in previous years:

For this first one, I reused green and white tissue paper, covered the join with green ribbon and then added a gift tag (recycled from a greetings card!) in matching colours. 

 

The second uses two different reused wrapping papers, a contrasting ribbon to cover the join and a gift tag made using wrapping paper glued onto recycled card.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other ideas to reduce the environmental impact of Christmas wrapping, include sending gifts that don't need to be wrapped (for example buying a virtual gift from a charity - see, for example, this selection from the People's Trust for Endangered Species); wrapping in colourful pages of old magazines or newspapers or wrapping in cloth. 

 

Most sticky tape includes plastic so to avoid this you can use twine or ribbon to tie up your gifts. I have to admit though I've never been able to tie up gifts in a way that looks either aesthetically pleasing or secure. Luckily, I've been able to source plastic free sticky tape in the past couple of years and use that instead.

There's an article about greening Christmas cards and wrapping on the Guardian newspaper website here. 

 

 

 

South Leith Cemetery

 

 I'm continuing my job of making wildlife surveys of all the council managed cemeteries in Edinburgh. Today I visited South Leith Cemetery, an ancient churchyard which is now surrounded by modern buildings and sits right next to a shopping centre. 

It's an attractive churchyard 

and is full of grey squirrels! There were at least ten of them chasing each other round the gravestones and it was quite tricky to catch one on film

Someone was in the churchyard feeding nuts and seeds to the squirrels and pigeons, I got the impression that they get fed every day! The feral pigeons lined up on nearby roofs 

 watching over the cemetery and flying off in a flock once in a while. 

Some of the gravestones had good numbers of ladybirds on them, mostly the invasive Harlequin ladybirds unfortunately, but also orange and 2 spot ladybirds which you can see in the photo below, crowding together with the Harlequins.

There's a secret seating area in the cemetery, hidden away, with a couple of nice benches 

and roses still in bloom,  

still in bud in fact!

CATS Cycling Across Time and Space edited by Elly Blue.

 

"In Space, No-one can hear you meow!"

I'm delighted to have a story in this anthology of feminist science fiction stories about cats and cycling. Each story includes at least one cat and one bicycle, but apart from that, there is a wide variety in the pieces. 

 Contents

Myx Sends It by Jessie Kwak.

Miss Tompkins Takes a Holiday by Kathleen Jowitt.

Mind the Tiger Plume by Cherise Fong.

Sophie by Summer Jewel Keown.

The Ninth Cycle by Gretchin Lair. 

The Certainty of Danger by Monique Cuillierier.

Case Study by Alice 'Huskyteer' Dryden.

Jetta by Judy Upton.

The Tiger's Tale by Juliet Wilson.

Like a Cat Needs a Bicycle by Kiya Nicoll.

Contact in 4, 3, 2 ,1 by Gerri Leen.

CATS: Cycling Across Time and Space, edited by Elly Blue is available from Microcosm Publishing at this link. 

I have a few copies available for purchase if you're interested. 

However, if you're in the USA or Canada and would like a copy, please buy from the link above, as the postage will be cheaper (it's shipped from the US)!

If you're in the UK and would like a copy of the book (£10 including postage and packing) let me know.

If you're overseas and would like a copy, let me know, and I'll get back to you about postage costs.