Like countless others this summer, we decided to stay in the UK for our holiday this year, combining our holiday with seeing friends and family whom we hadn’t seen before Covid. We decided to wait until the start of September to avoid the school holidays (the pleasure of being a retired teacher!) and began by taking the train up to Edinburgh. We’d visited the Botanic Gardens once before and decided to re-visit. We were not disappointed - by the gardens or the weather!

The area outside was fascinating as the alpines here are grown in a tufa wall which I discovered is a type of soft rock. It makes sense as these alpines grow on cliffs. Amazing to look at but not something that I could take back to my garden in Marden…

I found something that I could take back with me in the allotment area given over to horticultural students.  Here there are beds of wildflowers to encourage pollinators so of course I purchased a packet of (rather expensive) seeds from the shop. I was also reminded of the Teddy Bear sunflowers that I grew a few summers ago and resolved to grow some again next year. I was given a bunch of them from good old  M and S and discovered that they are very easy to grow.

They’re currently renovating the glasshouses and you may have seen on  this BBC news report that a 200 year old palm is being chopped down as part of this. The plant is apparently in decline but, as you can see from the article, the gardener who looks after it can’t bear to watch having lovingly cared for it for the past 10 years and will be on holiday when it happens…

Maybe next year MHS can hold a photography competition for the best photo taken when on holiday. As you can see, you won’t be facing much competition from my efforts!

Finally, cheating a bit here but we found a symbol of the restorative nature of plants in a church in Edinburgh: we saw a prayer tree created especially for this time of Covid. Each flower and each leaf contains a prayer of remembrance, of hope and of peace. Reminding us all of how much our gardens have meant to us in the past year.