Edinburgh, The Water of Leith and Botanic Gardens

4 April 2011 00:21

We had to drive my brother to Edinburgh airport on Saturday morning so we thought we might as well go and have another walk along by the Water of Leith and into Stockbridge.

So we parked the car at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and had a look round as usual before walking down to the footpath. As you can see they have a neon sign on the gallery building, to cheer us up I suppose.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art frontage close

Stockbridge is always dangerous for me because I can’t resist the book shops there, but more of that another day. Apart from being windy, which is the usual situation in Edinburgh, it was a nice blue sky day so we decided to continue the walk along the river in the direction of Edinburgh Botanic Gardens.

Reflections

We hadn’t walked that far before because we usually drive there and I thought it might be a bit too long a walk but we managed it. By that time we were carrying our book purchases too, well I have to admit it MY book purchases because my husband didn’t buy any, so it was all fairly knackering.

We just had to sit down when we got to the botanics, they’ve finished the refurbishment at last, they seemed to have been at it forever, but it’s all spiffing now and must have cost a fortune when you consider the price of stone nowadays.

New Entrance building Edinburgh Botanic Gardens

It was VERY busy, but to be honest there wasn’t an awful lot to be seen plant-wise, which was a surprise to me because I think of the botanics as being fairly sheltered but my garden plants seem to be further on than theirs. Most of the trees are still fairly bare but we’ll be going back again to check it out again soon because I wanted to buy a small magnolia from the garden centre but the thought of carrying it the very long way back to the car put me right off because we were exhausted by that time.

I think it was about a 10 mile round walk, which is the longest one we’ve done this year. Anyway I took some reasonable photos, there’s nearly always at least one heron in the river, yesterday there were two, and also a few anglers. I haven’t a clue what they can catch in there, maybe brown trout. I bet the birds would have the most success though.

Heron 1

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More spring plants

31 March 2011 22:50

This is euphorbia ‘Fireglow’ and it disappears completely over the winter but it comes back with a vengeance in the spring because it’s spreading like mad, even into the grass despite there being a stone barrier. It does look lovely when it’s fully grown although I think the new growth is a bit brash and phallic looking at the moment.

euphorbia 'Fireglow' stalks

Some of the pale daffodils in my front garden.

narcissus

For some reason this pulmonaria which goes by the horrible common name of lungwort has come out looking really insipid. It is in fact three different colours – blue, pink and lilac.

Pulmonaria

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Spring Garden

25 March 2011 01:03

These are a few of the photographs which I took in my garden today and yesterday. I’m still not used to our new camera as you can see from this blurred photo.

a primula
These are looking a bit battered about the edges now but they’re still nice and colourful, if you don’t look too closely.

a double primula

The double flowers somehow look to delicate for this time of the year but they are really hardy.

Yellow Daffodils

Not quite a host of golden daffodils but they do smell lovely, unlike the ones that you get in shops which don’t seem to have any scent at all.

I took photographs of hellebores, pulmonaria and euphorbia too, but I’ll do a post about them in a few days. It’s all happening in the garden now!

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Gardeners’ World on BBC 2

11 March 2011 23:48

For me having Gardeners’ World back on TV is one of the first signs of spring. Well I’ve never heard a real cuckoo calling which is the usual sign beloved of correspondents to The Times letters page.

I had actually given up watching Gardeners World last year because I just couldn’t take to the new presenters, Toby and Alys. I gave them a really good try but it just wasn’t happening for me. So I was chuffed when I heard that Monty Don is back at the helm again, and it should be even better than before because the action is all happening at Monty’s real garden, Long Meadow in Herefordshire.

Having just viewed the first programme I think it’s going to be a big improvement on Greenacres. Long Meadow is my kind of garden, I’ve been taking cuttings from box plants for years, with the intention of designing my own Celtic knot garden sometime in the future so it was nice to see that Monty has been doing the same thing.

Mind you, I still miss poor old Geoff Hamilton and Barnsdale, he was my absolute favourite – a knowledgeable gardener with a great sense of humour. He died far too young, but at least he left us a fair amount of books about gardening to look back on.

But if you want to see a wee bit of his last programme you can see it here.

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More gardening

1 March 2011 23:54

Crocuses 1

Pansy

I can hardly believe that we’re in March already, where is the year going? Every other day I’m finding something new in the garden which is blooming away cheerfully.

I love this time of year when the tree buds are beginning to fatten up too but it’s been hard work because I didn’t get to give the place a proper clear up before we were engulfed with snow and ice.

I’ve been gardening with the camera slung round my neck trying to get photographs of all the birds which hop around me while I uncover juicy morsels under garden rubbish, but they’re just too fast for me. I think they’re having a bit of a laugh behind my back.

Anyway, the plants can’t move so I managed some photos of them.

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Snowdrops

22 February 2011 23:08

Snowdrops

These are the snowdrops which I bought a couple of years ago at the Cambo Estate at Kingsbarns near St Andrews. They’re much bigger than the bog-standard Galanthus and so beautiful, they look like they’ve been painted by fairies.

They’re beginning to multiply and are spreading around the garden too and it hasn’t half cheered me up to see them again. After such an early start to the winter with the snow hitting us at least a month before it usually does these are proof that the worst is over.

Mind you, that could be famous last words because we often get snow around about Easter time!

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Kona Galaxy Garden

4 February 2011 00:37

Like loads of people I’m interested in astronomy, not in any technical sort of a way mind you just the usual sort of looking for meteor showers and solar eclipses and the like. Of course we all get excited about these things and then as we’re in Britain it turns out to be too cloudy to see much. I’ve seen a few eclipses and Halley’s Comet when it last visited us. Granny saw it the time before that too and she said it was much brighter in 1911.

Anyway, my husband is of the scientific type and The Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive is one of his favourite websites. Take a look if you’re interested in seeing fabulous photographs of the cosmos.

This photo from the site incorporates two interests of mine – gardening and astronomy – it’s a representation of the galaxy as a garden. It’s in Hawaii so I’m never going to visit it, it’s too hot and sunny for me but this photo is next best thing, I can imagine I’m there.

My husband was given a DVD of From the Earth to the Moon as a Christmas present so we spent part of the holidays watching it all and it took me right back to that exciting time when men were walking on the moon. I think I was 11 at the time of the first moon landing. Nowadays there are a lot of children who think that you are pulling their leg about it all. They just don’t realise that men have already been on the moon.

It’s quite sad really. Anyway if you like lovely astronomical photos take a look at the site, there are hundreds of them.

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Categories: DVDs, Gardening

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Winter garden

12 December 2010 23:44

This is how my garden looked after the first heavy snowfall, as you can see I had hoped to hang some washing out, hence the annoying washing line. I like to get the fresh air at stuff but in the past I’ve had to prise the clothes from the line and prop the stiff as a board washing up against furniture until it thaws.

I think it’s about 6 inches deep here but it did reach about 15 inches and I didn’t venture out in it again after nearly breaking my neck just going out to the bin with rubbish. The snow was solid ice by then. Speaking of which – none of our bins has been emptied for weeks now because of the roads, so fingers crossed that they can get to us this week before the snow hits us again. The forecasters are promising us more snow at the end of the week, and it’s below freezing again.

My greenhouse door is frozen shut. The same thing happened last year and the cold weather went on so long that my oldest cactus plant died. It was quite sad really because I bought it when I was only 11 so it was about 40 years old. The cacti had been fine in there over the whole winter in previous years.

This is a photograph of a local school. If you look carefully at the lower roof you can see the damage which was caused when a lot of thawing snow slipped onto it – £80,000 worth of damage apparently!

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A wee bit of an update

21 November 2010 17:20

It’s only when you have what feels like a hot roll of barbed wire lodged in your throat that you realise just how often you have to swallow, otherwise you never have to think about it. And that’s how I’ve been for about 5 or 6 days now. I think it’s only the third time in my life that I’ve almost completely lost my voice.

I haven’t been able to get on with my garden work due to having this horrible throat infection because I just don’t have the energy required for digging up the old crazy paving path which is the next thing on the gardening agenda, and I don’t want to make myself any worse than I already am.

So I don’t have any before and after photographs to show you, but I did take one of some cyclamen in an old upside-down chimney pot, there are some old lobelias there too, I know I should have chucked them out but if there are some flowers still going I can’t bear to uproot them.

This chimney pot design has 6 ‘pockets’ around it which are supposed to stop your chimney from drawing smoke down into your house, but when you use them as planters they are handy for putting crocus bulbs in for some early spring colour or any plant with a nice trailing habit in the summer.

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Autumn garden

1 November 2010 21:45

This was how my back garden looked yesterday, as you can see the acers are holding on to their leaves and there is still quite a lot of colour around. You can’t see the rowan tree (mountain ash) in any of these photographs but it is completely bare now. It’s a good tree to have as according to Celtic mythology it keeps evil witches away.

I managed to get out there this morning and gave it a bit of a ‘redd up’. I was quite ashamed, there were even brambles growing through the shrubs. By the time I realised, they were nearly ready to eat so I just left them and added them to a crumble of home grown apples, very tasty. But I had to get rid of them before they took over the garden.

You can see the finished stonework of the house. At first we thought it looked a bit weird but we got used to it and it’s good that the house now looks as it did when it was first built over 100 years ago. Well apart from the kitchen chimney now being missing and the roof slated over where it had been. It means that the kitchen isn’t so draughty now. The patch of ground underneath the wee square window (which used to be the coal hole and is now part of the kitchen) was my herb garden but most of them got flattened by the builder. They were beginning to die back anyway and they’ll be back again next year.

I’m not happy about the more modern small stone extension to the left. The previous owners built this (f)utility room and it doesn’t really blend in with the rest of the house.

I had to give up on the gardening this afternoon though as it had started to rain really heavily (which wasn’t forecasted) and it’s our first winter time day so it started to get dark about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Quite depressing really. On the plus side – it isn’t cold or windy.

It’s just a wee garden but there’s a lot packed into it and it’s the playground of an amazing number of birds.

I hate that ugly green metal clothes pole and I’m going to get rid of it. It’s nearly rusted through at the bottom anyway so any day now I’ll look out and the washing will be all over the garden when the clothes pole collapses under the strain. I think I’ll get one of those whirly things that you can remove when it’s not in use.

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