Category Archives: Edinburgh, a love letter

Walking Home At Sunset

The days are getting longer again. I walk to the bus in the growing light every morning – saw Venus today in the eggshell blue sky, just before the red sunrise drowned it out with brightness. And on my walk home, I get to see the tops of Edinburgh’s golden sandstone buildings still drenched in sunlight.

While I was crossing Princes Street, it began to rain lightly. I didn’t get that wet, or that cold, but it was enough to bring a rainbow.

Dsc00577

Taken 8 February 2006

The Balmoral clock tower in the light, with the Scott Monument in shadow.

DSC00578

Taken 8 February 2006

Up the hill a shadowy David Hume glowered near St Giles Cathedral

Dsc00579

Taken 8 February 2006

The pattern of the stones of the museum on Chamber Street satisfies me every time I pass it.

DSC00581

Taken 8 February 2006

The anarchists have also been out in force. I rather like this one.

Dsc00582

Taken 8 February 2006

And, last of all, a public service announcement. If you’ve lost your heart recently, it’s waiting for you on the wall across from the Potterow Port, right near the museum back door. It misses you.

Dsc00583

Taken 8 February 2006

Ice balls

It was a cold day after a cold night. I still needed to get out and get some light at lunchtime, even though the wind nipped at my hands and the tips of my ears. And it was worth it – look what I found!

I first noticed, walking by the Water of Leith near Stockbridge, that the edges of the water sparkled with little bright circles. Looking closer, I realised that they were balls of ice, hovering above the water level.

How did they come to be there? The water must have frozen overnight, along the edge of the burn, then thawed in the morning. As the sheets of ice broke up, the weight of the balls lightened until the leaves could spring back a little, pulling the last spheres up out of the water.

Or the fairies left them behind when they were playing marbles.

Ice balls.

DSC00519

Taken 31 January 2006

Frosty Day

Today was astonishingly cold. It was one of those days where I step outside the door in the morning, then duck back in to get my gloves on properly before venturing out for real. The sky was clear as crystal, and I watched a flock of fourteen blackbirds fly above me as I walked to the bus. The breath from my open-mouthed smile clouded in front of my eyes.

Things didn’t thaw as the morning progressed, either. I took a brief walk at lunchtime (after spending most of the hour indoors, with companions who object to frostbite and nicknames like Nine-Fingers and No-Ears), and the world was still frozen. Wow.

This is not an aerial shot of the antarctic desert from a high-flying airplaine, but part of the pattern of ice on a windscreen. The driver will have had an interesting time this evening.

DSC00513

Taken 30 January 2006

Frost-rimmed leaves, a pattern shot.

DSC00517

Taken 30 January 2006

This evening the fog descended like cotton wool. It was as dramatic as the ice, but a lot less photogenic.

January Walk Shots

It’s been a while since I’ve posted photos, mostly because I’ve been too ill to take many. The flu this year has been dreadful, and it made its mark as it swept through our household. Alex was ill week before last, Martin got it last week (and still coughing now), I fell ill last Thursday and didn’t really resurface until Sunday, and now Fiona is just coming out of a bad bout.

I have taken a few pictures over the past week or so, as I have walked my way back to health. But the muse hasn’t really been there. Here are the ones that made the cut.

The first crocus leaves, peeping up from the soil at the foot of my road. I think they are in for some difficult times.

Dsc00434

Taken 12 January 2006

Gate hardware, Drum Street. One of the few manmade items I’ve been drawn to photograph, mostly because it looks so human!.

Dsc00441

Taken 12 January 2006

Wrinkled rose hep, on a back path through Gilmerton.

DSC00445

Taken 12 January 2006

Grass underwater in the Water of Leith. (This photograph has been cropped and its colour altered to reduce the reflections off of the water.)

watergrass

Taken 18 January 2006

View through the fence, Powderhall.

Dsc00470

Taken 18 January 2006

Reddening ivy 1, Powderhall.

DSC00471

Taken 18 January 2006

Reddening ivy 2, Powderhall.

DSC00474

Taken 18 January 2006

Up the Hill

Although the weekdays this winter have been really good (because of my desk lamp and my lunchtime walks), the weekends have been very difficult. This one has been no exception. Not only has the weather been overcast these last days, but Alex’ recent illness left him unwilling to toerate bright lights. I spent yesterday in a dim house, and by today it was starting to tell on me. I felt unfocussed, off-rhythm, and deeply depressed. I wanted to curl up in a corner and simply cease to exist for a while. (This does not mean I wanted to die. I simply didn’t want to exist.)

Martin, saw me sitting by my light box, leaning my forehead on it like it was my only friend. So, though he was unwell, he sent me out of the house while Fiona napped and Alex played video games. I decided to do something energetic and definitive: I would climb Arthur’s Seat, and take some pictures on the way.

So I did. There wasn’t a lot of light even out of doors, but what there was, I got. (I also took 75 pictures. Luckily for your bandwidth, dear reader, my usual 33-50% good photo ratio did not hold up! I was just short of 20%, partly because of the low light.)

Photos of big stuff

My camera isn’t much on the big shots – I feel that it makes them all look like snapshots. (Or maybe I’m not a landscape photographer…) But I got a few wider-angle pictures that were special enough to post.

On the way up, looking north.

Dsc00353

Taken 7 January 2006

The moon rose over the ridge as I left. (Note that this photo has been cropped)

moonhill

Taken 7 January 2006

Coming down the hill, toward Newington.

Dsc00371

Taken 7 January 2006

Rock shots

Stone from the wall by the Commonwealth Pool

DSC00321

Taken 7 January 2006

Fragmented rock at the summit

Dsc00361

Taken 7 January 2006

Stone from the wall by the Pollock Halls

DSC00394

Taken 7 January 2006

Plant shots

A single thistle head in the grass

DSC00324

Taken 7 January 2006

Gorse blossoms

Dsc00329

Taken 7 January 2006

Dead thistle heads.

DSC00330

Taken 7 January 2006

Gorse against the sky

Dsc00337

Taken 7 January 2006

Bramble leaves

Dsc00339

Taken 7 January 2006

Moss and dead grass

DSC00349

Taken 7 January 2006

Stone in the hillside

DSC00364

Taken 7 January 2006

Seed heads against the sky

Dsc00389

Taken 7 January 2006

First Day Back

Back at work today, moved onto a project that I’m not expecting to be as fun as the one I’ve been on for the last 18 months. (That is a high standard – very little I have ever done professionally has been so enjoyable.) The rest of my gang is still together, launched onto something else, leaving me with the strong impulse to sulk and kick the furniture.

Rather than do that, I took a walk to the Botanics at lunchtime, getting my dose of daylight and my usual smattering of photographs. There were some OK ones, which I don’t intend to post, and some entirely uninteresting ones. But four really stood out.

Fern leaf, belly-up on the grass.

DSC00306

Taken 3 January 2006

Pattern: the dead leaves of a palm, still hanging from the trunk (this photo has been cropped, a thing I usually don’t do.)

palmleaves

Taken 3 January 2006

Lone bamboo shoot

Dsc00309

Taken 3 January 2006

Bamboo thicket…another “pattern” shot.

DSC00307

Taken 3 January 2006

I also stopped by the California Bay Laurel again, just to smell the leaves. Then, completely accidently, I found the Botanic’s only tan oak (Lithocarpus densiflorus), which I had planned to search for this month. Just walked straight to it, thinking, “That looks like tan oak.” And so it was.

Snow Pictures

Although we didn’t get the snowstorms that the north of England has been enjoying (?) the last day or so, we got a dust of snow last night. Today was cold enough that that dust didn’t go away. I was out in it, getting some zippers for making sofa cushion covers, and believe me, it was cold. (Yes, yes, for Edinburgh, a mild day for the arctic, or Toronto, but I’m a Californian and a wimp at that.)

I took a walk through the Meadows, looking for things to photograph in the snow, but found more on the city streets.

Cobbles on Buccleuch Street:

Dsc00249

Taken 28 December 2005

Leaf from an Edinburgh University courtyard:

Dsc00256

Taken 28 December 2005

Ice crystals between the cobbles:

Dsc00258

Taken 28 December 2005

But the richest venue for photographs turned out to be the walk back from the bus to my house, over the football pitch and beside the weedy path:

Dead grass in the snow:

DSC00263

Taken 28 December 2005

Live grass in the snow:

DSC00266

Taken 28 December 2005

The blades corkscrew in the cold:

Dsc00269

Taken 28 December 2005

Snow on the weeds:

Dsc00276

Taken 28 December 2005

Treespotting

I think I need to set more challenging objectives for my lunchtime walks. I found two of the three madrones (Arbutus menziesii) on the first day of searching. The hunt did take me into a bed that I hadn’t wandered through before, but actually, one of the madrones is visible from the road outside the gardens.

Anyway, the proof:

DSC00188

Taken 13 December 2005

One of the reasons I like madrone so much is its papery bark. On the younger branches, it peels off in entire sheets, exposing the green underbark. On older wood, it alligators like a charred log, which is much less dramatic.

Dsc00189

Taken 13 December 2005

The thirteenth was an overcast day, which made it difficult to take photos in natural light (I don’t use the camera’s light). The ones I got were either against the sky (this one has been lightened considerably to bring out the red in the leaves),

.

Taken 13 December 2005

…or lucky shots, still enough not to blur but slow enough to get the tremendous colour saturation that comes from overcast day photography.

Dsc00196

Taken 13 December 2005

I will have to pick a more evasive plant for my next quest.

Found it!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been engaged in an occasional search to find my favourite California native plant, the California bay laurel, in the Botanic Gardens near work. As you can see from the link, although the website has a bed location, it does not have a clickable link to the bed map. This made me wonder if the entry were old and outdated. Was the tree still there?

Even if the bed map entry was correct, I wasn’t sure where in the bed the tree would be. That bed happens to include a building as well as a number of plants, so it’s not the easiest place to search. Particularly for a plant I wasn’t sure was there.

But today, I found it.

The proof:

DSC00183

Taken 12 December 2005

I knew the tree before I saw the label, of course.

The bay laurel grows in all of the places I spent my childhood. It’s an integral part of the species mix up at my parents’ cabin, where it was a traditional headache cure for the native Americans in the area. It grows on the UC Berkeley campus, and indeed I got into occasional trouble for climbing it there. And for many years, one grew just outside my bedroom window in Piedmont.

The fragrance a broken leaf brings me right back to those places and those times. I brought one back to the office (bad of me to take it, I know). Each time I smelled it, I had another tiny flashback to my past, and another microburst of homesickness. The mix of bitterness and memory reflects the nature of the bay laurel itself.

Bay laurel is in the family Lauraceae, the same family as European bay, laurus nobilis, (as well as cinnamon, avocado and sassafrass, but that’s another story). Bay laurel has about a third more resin ducts in its longer, narrower leaves than its European cousin. The fragrance and flavour are slightly different between the species: the California bay is sweeter and sharper, the European slightly more bitter. It can be used in cookery much the way its relative is, but one should use only part of a leaf where the recipe calls for a whole bay leaf. Californian bay is also more of a tree and less of a hedge than its European counterpart, and is useless for topiary.

Soup, anyone?

Dsc00184

Taken 12 December 2005

(Next target: Arbutus menziesii, also known as Pacific Madrone.)


(While downloading pictures from my camera, I also ran across this one from last week.

)

Ivy stems.

Dsc00182

Taken 8 December 2005

Rainy Day Walking

It was a damp and muddy Monday for a lunchtime ramble. I was going to go to the Botanics to try to track down a California bay laurel (the tree I miss most from California). I stopped on the Rocheid Path to take some pictures and chat to a chance-met colleague, and never made it to the Botanics.

Fallen leaf on mossy wall.

Dsc00170

Taken 5 December 2005

Golden leaves and black stems.

Dsc00168

Taken 5 December 2005

I don’t know what this wee plant is, but it’s cute.

DSC00172

Taken 5 December 2005

Surprise! We’re in the middle of a city!

Dsc00175

Taken 5 December 2005

I know that not all of these pictures are worthy of Ansel Adams. My camera is extremely limited in what it can do, and even with a good camera I can’t always capture what it is that I find beautiful. I simply hope that the delight I felt in seeing these things comes through in the images.