Cornflower

Sights and scents

    Seen at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh this afternoon: a mass of meconopsis (Slieve Donard, above) and Remarkable Trees - a most striking and evocative exhibition of black and white photographs of trees taken in the Victorian era by George Paxton.

    Smelt there: maianthemum racemosum or false spikenard, a plant I hadn't come across before, its lovely scent wafting through an area of woodland on the slight breeze.

Jewel-bright

    Lovely fruit vinegars from Womersley, bought at Earthy but available online. We had a tasting today and even the sceptics here said they were quite delicious. The golden raspberry and apache chilli scored particularly highly but I love all three for the depth of their flavours and their versatility - on that subject, in The Home Handbook Rachel Simhon says that a sure cure for hiccups is to drink a teaspoon of vinegar; I tried it (with blackberry) and it worked!

Down to Earthy

    We've been eagerly anticipating the arrival of a branch of the food shop and café Earthy near us, and since it opened a few days ago I've been in three times.

  Suffice to say they have lots of lovely produce and store cupboard items to tempt me, friendly, helpful staff, good cakes and coffee, and it's five minutes' walk from my door.

On second thoughts, maybe that's a little too close for the bank balance and the waistline to stay in good shape - we shall see.

Dragon's teeth

    Out at Cramond this morning (if you've read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie you'll remember that Miss Brodie and her girls spend time there at Mr. Lowther's house),

low tide enabled us to see the full extent of 'the dragon's teeth',

wartime defences against submarines and torpedo boats which run from the shore to Cramond Island.

    Looking through the teeth up the Forth to the west, just visible there is Barnbougle Castle, part of the Dalmeny Estate.

Rebuilt by the 5th Earl of Rosebery in the 19th century, its main purpose was to house his library (it still performs that function), and incorporates a gallery hall in which he practised his speeches when he was prime minister.

Location, location

    Don't you love it when novels feature locations you know? An Edinburgh connection is usually a good draw for me, but I hadn't expected more than a passing reference to the city in Peter May's The Lewis Man which is set principally in the Outer Hebrides. However, the events of one major strand of the plot take place in and around the building pictured. Nowadays it's 'Modern Two', part of the National Galleries of Scotland, but fifty or sixty years ago it was an orphanage - there's a bit more about it in this post. Close by are Dean Village and the Dean Bridge - you can get a glimpse of them here - again, locations which play a very important part in the action of the book.

    The novel's epigraph is from The Old Fools by Philip Larkin:

"That is where they live: Not here and now, but where all happened once,"

and you'll see if you read the book - which I can highly recommend - just how germane that line is and how it relates to these Edinburgh locations.

Ghostly images

    Inspired by the wild flower the Ghost Orchid (Epipogium aphyllum), Scottish artist Siobhan Healy's delicate and lovely glass pieces - currently on display in the John Hope Gateway atrium at Edinburgh's botanical gardens - are intended to encourage the viewer to reflect on the transience and potential loss of this and other rare species. "The ghost orchid is an evocative emblem of the 1 in 5 of our wild flowers that are threatened with extinction. It is the most mysterious wildflower in Britain, the strangest, the rarest, and it was declared extinct during an absence of 23 years. But like a wandering spectre, the ghost orchid has reappeared." You can read more about it here.

    Sadly, the Royal Botanic Garden (our neighbour) lost 40 trees in the gales earlier this week. I haven't yet been in to see the sorry sight, but I know there were some important specimens among those that have fallen.

A hundred years ago in the garden

    Currently on show at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is the small exhibition The Living Collection - The People behind the Plants. I saw it today and was taken with these photographs of gardeners on the RBGE site at Inverleith between 1910 and 1920. Note the collars and ties - how formal compared to their modern counterparts' sweatshirts and fleeces.

    Given the approximate date of the pictures, I wonder how many of the young men we see here went off to war in 1914, and how many did not return to this most peaceful of places.

Sing, choirs of angels

    Here is a glimpse inside Edinburgh's St. Giles' Cathedral late this afternoon. We were there for a service of carols and readings, one which begins in candlelight, and as the building is gradually illuminated, so it also fills with glorious music and the spoken word.

    Just visible there in the organ loft is Peter Backhouse, another of the 'real' characters from the novels of Alexander McCall Smith - his playing has us lingering to listen even as the rest of the congregation are departing - but amongst much familiar music today the choir sang this Bob Chilcott setting of Christina Rosetti's "Midwinter" which I hadn't heard before; listen if you have a moment.

Point of view

    Put a convenient foreground feature between the camera and the focal point, and the message is a much more promising one! (Taken in the grounds of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art No. 2 - formerly the Dean Gallery, and you can see the artist, Nathan Coley, talking about this work from the 2.40 mark here).

    Meanwhile, across the road at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art No. 1, a reassuring message:

  

Remembrance

    Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. Requisitioned by the military during the First World War for use as a hospital for the treatment of shell-shocked officers, it was here that Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon met and wrote some of their greatest war poetry.

Instant sunshine

    I made the Tunisian Cake which we so enjoyed at the bookshop (scroll down for the picture) last week, and it is just as delicious as I'd hoped, but I hit a wee snag: the recipe says to put the mixture in a cold oven which you then set to go up to the required temperature, but as I cook on an Aga and thus have no such thing as a cold oven, I couldn't do it that way. Although I gave it only about half the full cooking time in the baking oven, when I checked on it I found it was still far from ready in the middle but rather too brown on top. I covered it with foil and put it back in to finish baking, and no harm was done - the well-firedness doesn't affect the taste at all, but when I make it again I think I'll get it going in the slowest oven then move it up, or perhaps use the cold shelf to reduce the temperature initially; if you're an Aga cook who has made this or a similar cake, perhaps you could let me know how you baked it.

    As to the ingredients, I used rapeseed oil instead of the olive specified and I'm very pleased with the result. I bought locally produced, sunshine yellow Supernature cold pressed rapeseed oil at Stockbridge Market, and I'll be going back for more next week. I'd suggest one further modification to the recipe and that is to use the juice of a whole (rather than a half) lemon and an orange for the syrup as the cake will easily absorb the extra liquid.

Architectural salvage

    This is Duncan's Land in Edinburgh's Gloucester Street. It dates from the late 1700s and was the birthplace of the painter David Roberts, but it was built with materials - including the carved lintel: FEAR GOD ONLYE  1605  - taken from a demolished building in the Old Town.

    For a look at part of the interior, click here.

Doing the dishes with Bertie

 

    Get your Bertie tea towel here!

    Edinburgh's Context Interiors - both in the flesh and online - are the sole stockist of this and other items inspired by Iain McIntosh's illustrations for Alexander McCall Smith's very popular 44 Scotland Street books.

    If you're a fan of those books and of his Isabel Dalhousie series (Mr. C. makes another appearance as himself in the latest one, The Forgotten Affairs Of Youth), you may like to see this short film of the author touring some of the books' locations.

Local colour

    At last, a lovely blue sky day, and everyone was enjoying the sunshine as I walked through Stockbridge and the New Town this morning on my way to meet Madeline Miller.

(I.J. Mellis the cheesemonger's website is here).

Pop-up

    I'd never been to a pop-up anything before this evening, but Canongate Books invited me to an event at their pop-up shop in Edinburgh's Queensferry Street, so now I can say I have. It was lovely to catch up with Lizzy there, and we were rubbing shoulders with such luminaries as Alasdair Gray and Richard Holloway. If you go along on Friday 26th. between 5.30 and 6.00 (it's at No. 20, by the way, and it's meant for just popping in) you'll catch Simon Callow doing a reading.