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In Memoriam – a spring song in late summer

May 29, 2023 / fay / 0 Comments

Early morning. Flickering light through the leaves of the cherry tree where the blackbird sings in May.

A wayward branch of struggling winter flowering tree that never bloomed until spring and then only on this one limb which had found an escape from the westerly winds.

But sadly, it has had to go. Or, to put it more precisely, to be taken away. Removed to make room for the external insulation cladding that will make the cottage fit for winter months, better equipped to meet the climate-changing challenges of extreme hot and cold.

When the work is done, we will plant something new to cast dancing shadows through the bedroom window. And lure another young blackbird to trill another tune, practicing his mating calls in May.

Let Nature Sing: Our Blackbird Sings the Blues

A branch bearing pink blossom peaks through our bedroom window at Pond Cottage in spring

Light filtering through wych elm seeds: picture Tommy Perman

Rebellion in the garden

May 10, 2023 / fay / 0 Comments

“What,” I asked, “are we doing here with a lifetime’s work ahead as we rebuild a derelict cottage and learn how to restore 10 acres of silted up pond and rundown woodland?”

Looking back, at forty-something we were mere babes in the wood. But I had an answer: “To understand why, you need to see the pond on a frosty winter afternoon, or catch sight of the heron fishing in the sluice stream, to find a bank of primroses above a pile of rusting corrugated iron, or sit on a starry summer night with family and friends round a bonfire in the new clearing while bats flicker above the ghosts of the old neighbourhood dump.”

I wrote that nearly thirty years ago. As journalists often do, I dug the words from both heart and head.

Newspaper cutting from The Herald, start of Fay Young's gardening series in Weekend Extra. Headline 'Wanted: a thick mulch of money'

Wanted: a deep mulch of money

April 29, 2023 / fay / 2 Comments

”Pond Cottage is an acreage of weed, rot and litter but Fay Young intends to turn it into a Scottish horticultural paradise”. That was The Herald almost thirty years ago in a quirkily offbeat introduction to my new dream commission: a Weekend Extra series about Scotland’s gardens and gardeners on a trail following my own discoveries. It was a happy year, leading to an unforgettable spell with Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as contributing editor and writer and ultimately to membership of Scotland’s Gardens Scheme. But back to the beginning…

Flashback to October 1995

Here, republishing my first Weekend Extra column in The Herald (don’t take that bit about horticultural paradise seriously!)

If you squint, the garden round Pond Cottage looks almost planned.

The stone path to the front door is lined with catmint covered with butterflies and bees. Hastily sown Alaska nasturtium seeds have grown into a convincing hedge around the vegetable plot. Red-stalked spinach contrasts cheerfully with yellow spaghetti squash plants and (as long as you are still squinting) a fresh green semi-circular lawn is marked by newly planted rowan and cherry to light up autumn and spring.

Free to roam in the woodland, Pond Cottage snowdrops looking as if they belong here. Photo Fay Young

Snowdrops greet Pond Cottage spring in a hard hat

March 12, 2023 / fay / 2 Comments

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me
Snowdrops: Louise Gluck

They sparkle. Even on dull days they light up the ground beneath our trees and this year they are putting on a particularly heroic display, defiantly poking through hard ground compacted by our long winter of construction work. They survive! Do not be deceived by their dainty, demure flowers, dear garden visitor: snowdrops are a truly tough bunch.

Record cover for SType by Surface Pressure

P is for panic in the A-Z of moving house

March 3, 2023 / fay / 5 Comments

Well then, H is for house, home, hidden, heartsore…and so on. J is for junk, just junk. But what is I for? On yet another sleepless night, rummaging through my newly made house-moving alphabet, it’s odd I can’t remember.

A view of the garden from above: picture Fay Young

Bye bye blackbird…and our Edinburgh urban jungle

January 23, 2023 / fay / 3 Comments

Through the window I saw a robin on the bird table, two blackbirds underneath, a grey squirrel in the white stemmed birch, four fat pigeons and three pretty doves squabbling on the ground. If we had a pear tree perhaps there would have been a partridge in it. A record-breaking cold spell brought hungry wildlife into our back garden. That’s something to celebrate just a short walk from Edinburgh city centre. Oddly, it added to my sense of loss as we packed to leave our old urban jungle home.

Standing stones near solstice by Vicky Brock: CC BY-SA 2.0

Sunset song for the winter solstice

December 21, 2022 / fay / 0 Comments

The winter sun just hangs over the ridge of the Coolags. Its setting will seal the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. At this season the sun is a pale wick between two gulfs of darkness.

So wrote George Mackay Brown, the observant eye of the great Orkney poet seeking out the touch of magic conjured up by the Neolithic architects who created Maeshowe with hard-hewn rock and a knowing eye on the heavens. Continue reading

Looking through our 'willow window' to the pond at Pond Cottage

Nature makes a happy mess at Pond Cottage

October 11, 2022 / fay / 2 Comments

‘But it’s the right kind of mess,’ she says, as I apologise for the tangle of wayward weeds tumbling across the path. ‘It’s so liberating. I’m going home to release my free spirit.’ Our garden visitors at the end of the season have been very kind. After a summer of unforeseen events the Pond Garden is wilder than ever.

Slowing the flow

August 31, 2022 / fay / 0 Comments

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 pour blame on the other party. And they certainly don’t need some smart-arse copywriter at the other end of the country blowing the dust off an old manual on natural flood management in Scotland.

[This was first published in 2014, reposting in August 2022 as climate extremes demand we start to learn from nature] Continue reading

Order Disorder: photo Rosa Menkman taken in Little Sparta CC By 2.0

No garden retreat at Little Sparta

July 2, 2022 / fay / 0 Comments

“I plant what grows,” the words of Ian Hamilton Finlay echo in my mind when I walk round our rain-spattered midsummer jungle. At this time of year the most sumptuous growth is in stuff we didn’t plant. I think of him again as the grass path cuts through a particularly belligerent looking bunch of nettles, docks and thistles. “Certain gardens are described as retreats,” said Finlay, “when they are really attacks.”

I was very lucky to get the chance to interview the poet-artist-revolutionary-gardener in real life almost twenty years ago. I approached him in his windy hillside garden a little warily, on guard in case of attack, and found instead a gentle man coming to terms with his recent stroke. It was one of the unforgettable privileges that sometimes come the way of a journalist. I have been to Little Sparta several times since and, though Ian Hamilton Finlay died in 2006, it is good to see the garden still grows true to the creator’s spirit.

Little Sparta is next open under Scotland’s Gardens Scheme on Tuesday 5 July. Meanwhile, I’m reprinting the article which first appeared in the (sadly) short-lived Scottish Garden magazine in 2003.

Flashback to October 1995

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