Monday, March 16, 2026

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. 



 


Monday, March 09, 2026

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. 
 

Monday, March 02, 2026

Cakes and flowers

Littlest Granddaughter has a lot of books in which American children set up lemonade stalls. This isn't a thing here, but she likes the idea and persuaded Daughter 2 to let her set up a table with cakes in the front garden. It rained a bit, but she persisted for a while, despite the fact that she lives in a very quiet street without many passing pedestrians. However, she managed to sell five cakes, and was pleased. The power of literature! I read American books as a child too, though there weren't all that many books for children then, compared to now. One I loved was "Thimble Summer" by Elizabeth Enwright. I loved the description of no rain (a foreign concept for a British person) and then the rain coming. And I remember Kewpie dolls being prizes, I think, at a fair. I had no idea what these were (I did look them up on Google once Google was a thing) but it didn't matter. Apart from that, I think the only American books available were the "What Katy Did" ones and the "Little Women" ones. I was - probably still am - quite influenced by Cousin Helen's maxim that everything and everyone has a rough and a smooth handle. I don't think it's made me quite as saintly as her, though. 

My snowdrop is yellow, by the way, to the extent that the bit behind the white petals is yellow, not the usual green. I think this yellow bit is the ovary. It's expensive because it's quite unusual. 


This is the £20 one.
These are the more usual ones. 

Do snowdrops happen in Australia? New Zealand? The US? 

It's been an uneventful week here, though not at all in the rest of the world. Urgh. Might the world be better without men??? Well no, but it's always men who start wars, isn't it? Just a few, horrible men. 

Meanwhile, I've managed to do a bit of gardening this week. Don't know how to eliminate the nasty men, so have been cutting down last year's herbaceous growth instead. Sadly, my left hip has been quite sore. I got my right one replaced a couple of years ago, but the left one has now gone, and because of the waiting lists for the NHS, I think it'll be well into next year before I have it done. The NHS is great, in that it will be free. But sadly there are too many crumbling oldies like me. I could pay and get it privately but that would cost £20,000. We'll see! It's nothing compared to what's happening in other places, but it's been a very mild winter with hardly any frost, so the weeds have been growing and I need to stop them in their tracks, hip or no hip.