The Death Clean continues.

It's the school holidays, and Son-in-Law1, the Edinburgh grandchildren and I went up Calton Hill, something I haven't done for years. Thought it's in the middle of the city, it used to be very quiet, but it's now a tourist destination - coaches parked at the bottom - and there were lots of people wandering around. The weather was beautiful, which no doubt encouraged lingering.  

This is Edinburgh's Disgrace. The plan was to build a replica of the Parthenon, with stones exactly the same size as in Greece, in honour of the Scottish dead in the Napoleonic Wars. The money was to be raised by public subscription, but only half of the £42,000 was produced so this is all that got built. It's still quite striking. 

It looks as if this leads straight on to Arthur's Seat in the distance, but there's actually quite a chunk of town in between. 

You get a good view of the Castle and the east end of the main part of town. 

Littlest Granddaughter and Daughter 2 have been staying, and this sort of thing has been happening. 

Littlest has more or less taught herself to knit and made this, with some other creations. 

But they've gone now. It was a beautiful day again today - looking this way. 

Looking the other way, though - the Great Book Purge has begun. So far, we've succeeded mainly in making a Great Mess, but we have hopes to continue the death cleaning in this area. There aren't that many books that I actually want to part with, but facts must be faced, one of which is that we probably won't live long enough (ie to our 150th birthdays) to reread them all (as well as using up all my fabric stash; but that's another story). 

 

Bean chihuahuas

Oh, this is such a lovely time of year. These tulips are doing well (if slightly out of focus) but I wish those pinker ones in the background weren't so near the big clump of red ones. How did I do this? 

This is a bit of a mixter-maxter of colours too, but I don't really think it matters. Nothing actually clashes. 

I have various huge clumps of daffodils which I think every year that I should split up, but never do. Not sure my back's up to it. And anyway, they seem fine. 

Daughter 2 gave me this lovely camellia, years ago. 

The other day we went, with a group Mr L belongs to, to the herbarium at the Botanic Gardens. We were shown round by a nice young chap who has devoted his life to studying peas and beans. Evidently broad beans are very strange - "the chihuahuas of the bean world" - because they're so overbred that they bear very little resemblance to their original progenitor. I'm not a huge fan of them anyway, though I do eat various other beans as I'm a vegetarian. He showed us some of these folders, with dried plants from various time periods. They have - did he say 3 million? - specimens. They dry new ones much as one did as a child, by squashing them between newspaper in a press. It was very interesting. He said that some amateur collectors in the past would just label their specimens something like "Brazil", whereas nowadays labels are much more specific, eg "Rocky area with sandy soil near the top of the Knock, Crieff".

It's very much rhododendron time at the Botanics - though actually this spans several months. 

Today we went to the local flower show in Saughton Park. Oh, the scent of these hyacinths!

The park isn't in its full glory yet, but was still pretty, even though it was raining.

Our death cleaning is progressing quite well. We went to the tip and the charity shop the other day with quite a few items, and put things on Facebook Marketplace: two bed rails for children, a micro scooter and Daughter 2's drawing board from when she was an architecture student. The drawing board hasn't gone yet but the rest of the things have - they were free. It'll be a long time till we're exactly minimal (well, never) but I feel we're making progress, and I'm quite enjoying the weekly challenge of finding something we don't need.  

 

Edinburgh tram?

We've been away for a couple of nights to Crieff Hydro, an hour and a bit north of here. This hotel means a lot to me and our family. My parents took us there every summer from when I was three till I was eleven, and then we've all been back a lot since in various familial combinations. We took our children. Now we go with them and the grandchildren, and sometimes my brother and family. Mr L and I had our honeymoon there. Both my parents' ashes are scattered on the Knock, the hill behind the hotel. 

Of course things have changed a lot since I was first there in 1953; and we've liked some changes more than others. But much of the charm stays the same, such as, when one first comes in, the view through the spacious ballroom (which hosts Scottish country dancing some evenings) into the Winter Garden, a large room with huge windows on to the beautiful view. One sits there and drinks coffee with one's family. One waits for the children to come up from the pool there. One has a light lunch there. It's the heart of the hotel. 

Or, that's what it was like.

The owners have now put a huge oval bar in the middle of the (ex-) ballroom. Tastes vary, but surely no one thinks that this is a thing of beauty? 

As transport-mad Big Grandson points out, it's reminiscent of an old Edinburgh tram. But with added plastic greenery dripping from it. 

And the Winter Garden has been turned into an extra restaurant, with tables set from early morning for lunch and thus nowhere to sit with the family and drink coffee. Big round banquettes (is that how you spell them?) help to block out the light. 

With added fake trees, and other plastic plants. 

I know that with the world in a mess, saying that I'm heartbroken seems a bit of an exaggeration. But I'm very sad. 

Anyway, we had as nice a time as we could, all things considered. We climbed the Knock, as we always do. I wonder when the last time we manage it will be...? 

This is one of my favourite views of all time. 

It's so peaceful. 

I always look at this distant white house and wonder what it would be like to live there. 

Failing the Winter Garden, we visited the town and its lovely shop, selling art and glass and so on (I managed not to buy anything this time, well done me) sat in our room, read books and did the crossword. 

And then we came home again. I like two-day holidays. So little packing. You don't need to worry about the house plants or the garden. So it wasn't all bad. 

 

More flowers. And death cleaning.

This is the time of year when my amaryllises (is that the plural?) flower all at once and I don't really know what to do with them, because they're huge. I have three pots of them and they sit in a spare room looking boringly leafy for 11 months, and then have their fortnight of glory downstairs. In fact, they badly need to be repotted and split into at least 8 pots, but do I want 8 leafy pots sitting around all year? I do not. The year before last, I did some splitting, and got rid of 3 pots to friends. Next year I must do more of this! The trouble is that I can't bear to throw them away. And you can't really persuade people to accept them apart from when they're in bud and look promising. I've had the original bulb for... oh, it must be twenty or more years. 

Talking of getting rid of things, I've made a resolution that every Monday morning I'm going to throw something away or take it to a charity shop. Thus if I live to, oh, 96, my children won't have much to do with my stuff when I die. So far we've kept this up for two weeks but I'm determined to continue. Books don't count. We do take books to charity shops anyway. But we have a lot of books. 

A member of the choir of which I'm chair died suddenly on Saturday. She felt unwell all week, then felt better, then felt worse and died on the way to hospital. She was at choir the previous week, apparently fine. Keep decluttering, Pam. I mean, she was 78, but I'm 75. 

It's spring in the garden. 

Lovely lovely. 

I've done quite a bit of tidying, but there's still more to do. However, weeding this hyacinth bed was a pleasure. The scent!

This is my little shady reading corner for hot weather. But it's not hot yet. 

Pink and yellow don't really go together, but I think they're fine here. Every year I buy quite a few hyacinths at the supermarket to have in the house over a couple of months, and then I plant them in the garden afterwards. We've been in the house for 36 years, so it's quite a hyacinthy garden. I  hope the people who come after us in the house don't concrete the whole thing over. 

In London, Littlest Granddaughter looks at a new book on the stairs. 

In Dundee Botanic Gardens yesterday, Small Grandson runs on stepping stones. We were up to see the family, which was very nice, though Dundee Botanics aren't a patch on the Edinburgh ones, and they charge you £5 entry fee, while the Edinburgh ones are free. I think the Edinburgh ones should charge, really; but I'm very glad they don't. 

 

Parks

It's all about the flowers at this time of year. We went to our beloved Botanics and admired the many rhododendrons. 

Oh, the pinkness. 

I also really like this, which is apparently a hacquetia epipactis variegata. I don't remember seeing it before but I thought it was pretty. I'm not normally a fan of green flowers, but these are definitely as much yellow as green, and so bright against the brown earth.

We all have muscari, and they're frankly a bit of a pest, but they're also a lovely splash of blue after a grey winter. 

Lots of hellebores, which are not huge fans of my garden, though I have a lovely one in a pot that's lasted several years. 

 

The open greenhouse is full of colourful alpines. 

Then this morning we found we'd had some overnight snow! But it didn't last. 

I went down to Saughton Park to meet a friend for coffee. This bed is really just heather and pieris, but they make a nice bright splash,

as do these polyanthus. It does the eyes and the soul good to see colour at this time of year - an annual miracle. 

 

Happy Birthday, little (not so little) L!

It's Biggest Granddaughter's 13th birthday today (13!!) so yesterday we had a celebratory lunch at Swanston and then walked up the hill behind the brasserie, past the old Swanston Village. It was a beautiful day. 

The hills still had some snow on them, but it was quite warm on the lower slopes.  

You can see how near we are to the city - no distance at all, really. Just a golf course away. 

Littlest Granddaughter decided that she wanted to play the violin. We feel she may have unrealistic expectations, but Daughter 2 asked us to send her own violin down to her, and she found a second hand, half-size violin online to give Littlest a few lessons without committing to a teacher. The violins arrived together. When we were taking Daughter 2's instrument to the post office, we felt a bit like the gangsters in Bugsy Malone, concealing our machine guns. The post office chap was amused. I don't think he'd ever accepted a violin in the post before. 

And in the garden, 

spring

is 

definitely

coming in

at full tilt.