Fay Young

There is more than one way to be a patriot. The sign lit up in red on the back of a bike in the Contemporary Art Museum Bordeaux exhibition "

Gathering seeds of hope – on a train trip from Scotland to France

October 14, 2025 / fay / 0 Comments

The ugly dark hulk has a daunting bulk. A grim legacy of the Nazi occupation. The old submarine base still occupies the Bacalan district of Bordeaux. So many tons of concrete – 600,000 cubic metres of them – would be difficult to remove.

But walk round it and there’s a surprising softening in an imaginative reclaiming of wasteland. Winding borders of flowers – blue, pink, purple, white – and waving grasses invite butterflies, bees and birds to feed and the wildlife happily obliges. Why not? Plant it right and they will come.

A close up of a leek flower feeding hover flies, butterflies and shiny insects I don't know the names of — Flowering leeks turned out to be a feast for pollinators

Pond Cottage nature notes – making a happy mess.

August 24, 2025 / fay / 0 Comments

Too hot to do the outside work I had planned. I stay indoors with windows open to invite a cooling breeze while I tweak at words for next year’s Pond Cottage entry in Scotland’s Gardens Scheme 2026 Yellow Book. Is it right?

A sketch of the young mother swan and her six cygnets on the nest among reeds at Pond Cottage: a gift from artist Rowena Millard — "it is a joy to be outside looking at and trying to capture the natural world around.” Artist Rowena Millard

The Resilience of Swans: Parenting Lessons from Pond Cottage

July 8, 2025 / fay / 0 Comments

On another wet and windy day we return to Pond Cottage after a night away, pausing by the gate to check the postbox. And there’s a surprise package, a gift that brightens the gloom: a delightful sketch of our Mother Swan by the talented artist Rowena Millard.

'There was something about the place' The derelict cottage framed by trees and wild roses — There was something about the place

Mud pies and memories of freedom

April 18, 2025 / fay / 4 Comments

Open the door and there’s a big green velvet curtain to keep the living room warm, in granny’s bedroom a pretty dressing table set decorated with pink – maybe purple? – flowers. A potty tucked discreetly under the bed.

No bathroom. The toilet is outside in a whitewashed washhouse. At bedtime the grandchildren are marched dutifully across with a big red torch until a rabbit appears in the field on the other side of the hedge. And they’re off…

“Freedom! That’s what it was. Freedom to do what we wanted.”

Memories fill the room. Memories and laughter with three grown women, Mary, Anne and Marian, sitting round a table in a room that didn’t exist on their weekend visits to their grandparents at Pond Cottage more than 60 years ago. [Press play to join them.]

A close up look at green shoots of bluebells at Pond Cottage

A gift of hope

March 31, 2025 / fay / 0 Comments

Green shoots of hope – I’ve just had a lovely message from a generous man, a rare philanthropist, who is offering to match the money we raise this year for CHAS (Children’s Hospices Across Scotland) through our Scotland’s Gardens Scheme openings.

He means it, he was so impressed by what he learned about CHAS when he visited The Pond Garden two years ago he made a three figure donation. With your support we can help him give more this year.

A rusty metal fox treads through the wilder parts of the garden, nettles clamber over a dead hedge

Rewilding: or how to be led by Nature

October 19, 2024 / fay / 0 Comments

Rewilding was not a word in the 1990s when we bought our ten acres of temptingly untended land. Or at least not a word we had heard.

Close encounter with a dragon fly in the veg garden at Pond Cottage: a Common Darter according to Bug Life

Plants, pollinators, people: welcome to the Pond Garden

September 3, 2024 / fay / 0 Comments

Autumn on the horizon. Will we know the difference? It has felt like October for much of the summer this year. But today a mischievous sun peeks through fluffy clouds (such flirts!) and in the garden I find a buzz of pollinators partying among the plants. Great opportunists. True survivors. Perhaps they can help me plot a course for 2025.

The specially designed postcard for Every Tree Tells a Story

Every tree tells a story at Pond Cottage

July 3, 2024 / fay / 4 Comments

Planting a tree is to have hope for the future…
The old oak tree

The story so far. On a sunny afternoon in May a small group gathered among the trees at Pond Cottage to explore how storytelling can reconnect people with the natural world. And what we all gain when we do.

Can we trust the weather forecast? Let's put up the gazebo just in case: picture Fay Young, Pond Cottage

Tree stories stir hearts and perhaps a sense of hope

June 1, 2024 / fay / 3 Comments

It was a gentle afternoon. No workshops, no break outs, no lectures, and certainly no rants. Just a meandering walk and talk through paths and clearings of our almost natural woodland, sharing thoughts about trees, birds, bats, butterflies. And how much we all enjoy being in a place where you can hear birds sing.

Roy Ayers at the Liquid Rooms in August 2022, photo Fay Young

Everybody loves the sunshine…with a little cooling breeze

August 13, 2025 / fay / 0 Comments

“Just bees, and things and flowers”

Like a lot of formerly news-hungry journalists these days I can hardly bear to open the many journals I subscribe to. But earlier this year I read the FT’s Life of a Song. And Roy Ayers Sunshine blew Trump thunderstorms away.

Galanthus “Trumps” at Pond Cottage

February 25, 2025 / fay / 0 Comments

Here we are. At the start of our visiting season I’m not in the best of moods but I stop reading the news to take a walk round the garden and I can’t help smiling when I find the snowdrop given by a dear, gardening friend last year. Perky, eye catching, Galanthus “Trumps” could do with a new name, I think, but what a beauty.

A view across the tree-line to the snow capped summit This Creative Commons image of the Sagarmatha National Park is By © Vyacheslav Argenberg CC by 4.0

A Himalayan birch for Ronnie

December 31, 2024 / fay / 4 Comments

“I just enjoy being among the mountains, that’s good enough, I don’t need to get to the top…” Ronnie Faux, born Burnley 8 November 1935, died Carlisle 16 July 2024.

Before this turbulent 2024 ends, there’s still just time to add one more tree story. We have planted a Himalayan birch in memory of our dear friend Ronnie Faux. It seems a good match for an adventurer who enjoyed clinging to rocky ridges in snowy places.

Four poems for a budget of winners and losers – what hope?

December 19, 2024 / fay / 0 Comments

‘And remember to give them hope.’ Alastair Darling, November 2024.

I wrote this for Sceptical Scot’s poetry section in November 2024 when there still seemed some room for sceptical hope. Reposting in March 2025. Where’s the hope for the losers in Rachel Reeves Spring Statement?]

Looking back, the words seem to echo. On 19 December 2023, Rachel Reeves was speaking from the pulpit at the memorial service of Alastair Darling in an overflowing St Mary’s Cathedral, the Episcopal one at Edinburgh’s West End.

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