It was back in August the 14th that we visited the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and it was a searingly hot day, well to me anyway but maybe not to others. It felt strange to be out and about as due to Covid-19 we hadn’t travelled so far from home since February, we had to book a time of arrival so that lots of people didn’t arrive at the gates at the same time, but it still seemed quite busy to me.
There’s a grove of Monkey Puzzle trees (Aurucaria) they seem to be love or hate trees but I recall one from a park in my early childhood and I’ve always admired their strangeness.
There were still quite a lot of things in flower despite August often being regarded as being quite a sparse time for gardens in Scotland with many flowers having performed already. The agapanthus flowers were still going strong, I love that shade of blue.
The early dahlias have a background of statuesque bamboos, those are not something that you want to let loose in your own garden as if you aren’t careful they’ll take over.
A water feature runs through the rockery section, looking very natural.
I think the common name for the grasses below is Angels’ fishing rod, it’s very elegant whatever it is.
Of course Acers/Japanese Maples are always a favourite with me.
It was quite exhausting walking around so we didn’t stay too long, it was too hot and bright for us. We did manage to have a rest on a bench for a while which was good, some places have taped off all the benches or removed them so that people can’t have a sit down on them and potentially contaminate them with Covid-19. A black cat came and hid from the sun under the bench we were sitting on. I’m not sure if that was meant to be good or bad luck as it didn’t cross our path. Anyway, here we are back at Covid restrictions again after a brief respite, and from Friday we aren’t allowed to have anyone in our houses again, it’ll be worse this time around as it’s now too cold to have friends or family visiting and just chatting in the garden, but at least we can still travel around, for the moment anyway.
