Category: Environment
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Bye bye blackbird…and our Edinburgh urban jungle
Global campaigns sound alarms in a new age of mass extinctions – but local gardens can be sanctuaries, instead of parked cars there could be nature reserves at many more back doors.
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Slowing the flow
Sustainable flood management enables communities to adapt to the realities of climate change. Restoring natural defences against flooding brings social, economic and environmental benefits to the whole community. Pity the people of Somerset Levels. The last thing they need as the weather report threatens more rain and gales, is a rush of politicians anxious to…
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No garden retreat at Little Sparta
Order…disorder: “The present order is the disorder of the future.” Louis Antoine de Saint-Just 1767-1794 But it’s Ian Hamilton Finlay’s words that echo round the garden today.
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One snort for hello?
At no risk to ourselves we can make our own surrounds much greener, safer – and a lot more pleasant.
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Why are we waiting?
During the 2020 July/August heatwave those of us in Room 11, Ward 106 of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary discovered just how hot a ward could be.
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Winter into Spring
It’s a turning point. For so long it seems a teasing fantasy, a few brave buds on some hopeful trees and shrubs, a cheery blackbird outside the bedroom window greeting an earlier sunrise. Then suddenly there’s no doubt. Whatever the weather, Spring is here and this year it brings an unexpected new season to Pond…
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We’re all islanders in a pandemic
In retrospect it all seems eerily prophetic. Those faces framed in small screens, their distant voices interconnecting in the ether. Yet for Giles Perring it’s something much simpler and more profound than Zoom
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For love of life
I thought back to another year I knew Autumn, lifting potatoes and stacking peats On Mull… Ruthven Todd There it is. Reading aloud from his latest book, Alexander McCall Smith nabs a furtive shadow from another time with a few lines from Ruthven Todd’s poem written in 1938.
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Weaving a magic spell against Brexit borders
Weaving with dogwood feels like satin flowing through your fingers: soft, supple, satisfying. What’s more, concentrating on rhythm and shape leaves very little time for thinking about Brexit. Or mind-numbing border politics.
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Pioneering women gardeners: visible at last
Girls will be boys? The terms of employment were simple, if a little strange. The first two women admitted to the staff at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1897 were to be known as ‘boys’ and had to dress like boys too.
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The revolutionary power of simple pleasures
What kind of times are they, when A talk about trees is almost a crime Because it implies silence about so many horrors Bertolt Brecht A catalogue in the post. Not so very long ago that would have brought a promise of armchair gardening. Happy hours leafing through pages of plants I was unlikely to…
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Winds of change at The Botanics
With rich irony the latest exhibition at Inverleith House is titled I Still Believe in Miracles. But no miracle is likely to save the art gallery from closure after the doors shut on a show celebrating 30 years at the heart of contemporary art in Edinburgh.