Love Parks Week

Celebrate your local green-spaces!

Hi again and welcome! Today, thinking about Love Parks Week, I'm going to focus on the value of parks and green-spaces.

Love Parks Week (26 July - 4 August) is a campaign organised by Keep Britain Tidy, that highlights the vital role parks and other green-spaces play in boosting health and well-being. Parks and other green spaces offer many benefits, including: pleasant spaces for exercise, recreation and socialising and sanctuaries for wildlife.

The first public parks in the UK were established during the 1840s, when they were seen as an antidote to the growing cities of the Victorian era. Parks continue to offer valuable green-spaces in cities and towns across the country and across the world.

Edinburgh is a city with a good number of parks and green-spaces, including Local Nature Reserves (see this interactive map showing all the local nature reserves in Edinburgh), Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) (see this link for a full list of SSSIs in Edinburgh and West Lothian) and farm fields (including the Edinburgh Agro-ecology project at Lauriston Farm) as well as public parks. Edinburgh's public parks can be found across the city, including Princes Street Gardens, located in the centre of town, near Edinburgh Castle, seen below in beautiful October sunshine.

One of our local parks, Saughton Park was awarded money from the National Lottery around ten years ago for an ambitious refurbishment project, which has seen the park restored to its former glory, including the reinstatement of the historic bandstand.

Saughton Park has also seen the establishment of the Four Square café that employs people with a history of homelessness and raises money for a local homeless support charity. Saughton Park is one of Edinburgh's several parks that is located alongside the Water of Leith, and is a good place to see some of the city's otters.

Not everything is so rosy for our parks, though. Many people in Edinburgh are concerned about the increasing privatisation of parks, particularly Princes Street Gardens, which in recent years have often been closed to the general public to allow for ticketed events, accessible only to fee paying customers. Years ago, during the Edinburgh Festival season (mostly August) you used to be able to sit in the gardens while musicians with shows on at the Fringe Festival would give free concerts at the bandstand in the park, while later in the year, the gardens were a favourite place for a Christmas Day walk. These days, the only concerts in the park during August are ticketed, while the gardens are entirely closed off to the public for a significant part of the Christmas season while being prepared for ticketed Hogmanay events. This significantly restricts people’s easy access to quality green-space in the city centre.

Meanwhile, another of our local parks, Dalry-Gorgie Community Park is currently entirely shut and parts have been bulldozed out of existence to create a cycle-path (we've also lost an entire woodland Sauchiebank Woods for the same reason, while, irony of ironies, an existing wooded cycle-path is slated to be turned into a tramway, with all the trees, of course, likely to be removed). The irony of a vital urban green-space being destroyed to make way for so-called green infrastructure is seemingly entirely lost on city planners. We are promised that the park will be improved once the cycle-path is built, but any saplings planted will take thirty years or so to reach maturity, and that depends on them being looked after properly after being planted (which often isn’t the case as attested by the number of dying saplings seen across the city).

So, Love Parks Week is a chance to celebrate the parks we have, but also a reminder to be vigilant to ensure that these parks remain thriving green-spaces offering public access to recreational opportunities and sanctuaries for wildlife.

I've been Published!

I'm delighted to have a haiku included in the Birdsong issue of Haiku Girl Summer.

In the News

Climate crisis is making days longer, study finds, article in the Guardian.

Contempt, gagging and UN intervention: inside the UK’s wildest climate trial, article in the Guardian.

Where are all the butterflies this summer? Their absence is telling us something important, article in the Guardian.

Another Nature Themed Week coming soon

National Marine Week (27 July - 11 August) and yes that does seem to be longer than a week

What I'm Reading

The Enchanted Canopy by Andrew W Mitchell, a classic from the 1980s, all about rainforest ecology and early attempts to study it using aerial walkways. It's full of wonderful photos, but the reader can't help wondering how much of the forest featured in this book has been lost in the forty years since it was written.

What I'm Watching

Alba Uaine (Green Scotland) documentary in Scottish Gaelic (with English subtitles) on ways in which Scotland can become more green. This programme is on BBC Alba and can only be watched in the UK.