A substantial spell of cold weather matters for many plants. That term vernalisation is the process where the cold is key to successful germination in a wide variety of plants. Traditionally garlic is ‘planted on the shortest day and harvested on the longest’. Why? Because garlic needs the cold of December-February to trigger the seed clove to produce a number of cloves in the new plant as it grows. The same applies to soft fruit like blackcurrants and gooseberries, and ‘top fruit’ such as apples and pears. All of them need about six weeks of consistently cold weather each winter. This not just to kill of bugs and pests – though that helps, but because they need a ‘chill factor’ as part of their seasonal renewal. And these days we aren’t getting it. How long ago is it since we consistently had six weeks of cold frosty and snowy weather in southern England each December-February? Quite a while. So much so that a 2-3 week spell seems both unusual and a cause for gardeners and growers to breathe a sigh of relief. And its not just fruit trees and the like that are affected; there is a tradition that root crops like parsnips are best not lifted until there have been a few frosts on them. Why? Because the frost encourages the plants to break down starch into sugars, and makes them all the tastier for us when harvested.

Meanwhile the cry goes up that as a nation we need more food security. Global instability and climatic changes that lead to crop failures in countries we increasingly rely on to feed us, are driving up food prices and with it a critical element of the cost of living crisis. So we should grow more ourselves and import less. While we do grow most of our food – just, arounf 53% , that proportion has dropped significantly since a high point in the early 1980s. Far more focus on horticulture as opposed to arable crops will help on the food security front. Meantime we just have to hope for less winter rain and their accompanying devastating floods, and a few more of those cold frosty winter days instead. The hedgehogs will thank us too.

This being the 100 anniversary there was a talk in the house after lunch by early printing collaborator Michael Hamish Glen who worked with Hamilton Finlay when he was very young. Charming, amusing, and informative. A fascinating coda; he is now (relatively recently) the partner of Sue Finlay who was H-F’s wife, and mother of his two children, and left him in 1990. I dont think he was the easiest person to live or work with. Michael was keen to point out – correctly I’m sure, just how important Sue was as a collaborator, particularly in relation to the construction of the garden. Hamilton Finlay had ideas, many of them good ones, but needed people to make them happen. The story of many great artists down the ages. Both of these two in different periods of his life and in relation to different art forms very much did this. Michael’s insights in to Hamilton-Finlays work and methods really made the day.

The garden is a bit of a walk from the car park, so the day managed to combine a stimulating talk (with souvenir print keepsake), a garden visit like no other, and a spectaular country walk from farm cottage and garden to car park in late summer sunshine. A combination that surely Ian Hamilton Finlay would have approved of, and no doubt enjoyed himself on many occasions. Cheers to his memory!

It is a big subject, slavery was a really important engine of wealth creation for the British Empire, not least for the merchants of Bristol. But this is part of the problem with the exhibition. It has been squeezed into a relatively small space in the museum. The result is that it promises more than it delivers. Ashman’s insight is to foreground the minute illustrations of African figures in Lindsay’s illustrations of his book, so creating an alternative narrative that explores how indigenous and African-Jamaicans used plants to resist their enslavement. It is certainly enlightening to discover what enslaved Africans and indigenous Jamaicans would have used as a form of resistance and connection to spirituality. So, Bellyache Bush was used as an abortifacient. The leaves and uncooked tubers of the Cassava were used to assist for both birth control and poison, while the Antidote Caccoon was considered an antidote to poison.  Plants with a spiritual dimension included Spiritweed – said to protect from malevolent ‘duppies’ or ghosts. The magic of horticulture is a key element of the work – plants as resistance, growing as rebellion. All this is stated and explained in the exhibitions accompanying explanatory texts, but in terms of source materials or responses to them there isn’t the room (or perhaps the funding?) to provide something that really seizes the imagination. Glimpses yes, a case made for sure, but a sense that there is so much more to explore that we don’t get to see.

I had a preconception that I’d be mucking around in something muddy and interactive and wondered if it would be quite small and a bit errr…. grey and dusty.  Not at all! This has to rate as one of the more extraordinary and revelatory exhibitions I’ve been to in some time. Now I know  something about soil… or I think I do. After all I’ve been digging, growing, composting, mulching and generally enjoying the Muck in soils for decades. They can’t tell me anything new. But actually it opens up a whole set of new vistas and understandings of a subject that collectively I sense we both feel we know a lot about – after all we stand on the stuff a great deal of our lives, and often not so much – we don’t examine it all that closely, except when we do.  So seeing it in a completely new context, an exhibition space, and  presented in ways that definitely aren’t grey and dusty  gives anyone, including Lord Muck, a completely new perspective.

Kicking things off are a series of photographs  by Frances Bourely of creatures that live in the soil and contribute so much to it – dung beetles and the like, highly magnified,  images somewhere between horror and surrealism. Jo Pearl  has a  wonderful collection of strange creatures hanging from wires, drifting in space,  an installation she describes as ‘oddkin’,  ‘…an attempt to overcome squeamishness and germophobia about soil’. So lovely, they look like something from an unusual Christmas tree decoration box. And of course they are all fashioned from clay.

The exhibition is staged over several floors and this is put to good use for example in a wonderful set of photographs  by Jim Richardson titled ‘Big Bluestem’ of the prarie plant.  Basically its ‘just grass’ on the American Praries. But look underneath in the soil. No wonder the ‘Dust Bowl’ occurred. This grass, so unprepossessing on the surface  has a rootscape  documented over six lightbox panels (three more are above ground) stretching down over four metres. No chance of being blown away or struggling in drought. Until  ‘civilisation’ got to work. Some of the ideas are so simple; a series of what look like they could be photographs of distant planets turn out to be  the result of soil  interacting directly with moistened colour film, soil and chemicals producing dramatic multicoloured images.

Fungus gets a big shout out too. More stunning photography  from Jo Pearl and even more extraordinary,  a collective called Marshmallow Laser Feast  who take us on a  filmic underground journey to reveal the way fungi roots break down and recycle dead plant and animal matter. The network  nourishes the mushrooms above ground which  in turn shed their spores out into the air. It’s no accident that the film is continuous – just like the ecological cycle it records.

Not everything about the soil is underground though. The utterly charming photographs by Ken Griffiths  ‘A country cottage calendar 1974’, records in  a dozen monthly snapshots the rebirth, growth, flowering, harvesting and return to dormancy of the garden of an elderly couple, the Sweetman’s  across a year. It is touching  not least because they aren’t recorded doing any actual gardening, but rather stand proudly in it just knowing what they and nature have created. More  troubling is a film originally shot in the 1930s and 40s in what was then the Holy Land  by a Scottish missionary seeking to record the flowers of this even then contested land. The original film – shot in colour, unusual for that time itself had lain unwatched for decades  until it was restored and reframed as  an elegy to something past and yet not forgotten. The beauty of Palestine – mainly as far as I could tell shot around the Sea of Galilee, was obvious; lake, landscapes, flowers and the friends and family of the minister picnicking, walking, and examining and picking the flora in an unhurried and unselfconscious way – little realising  the dystopian horrors of what was to follow. Locals got practically no look in – so some things never change –  a point made in the remake. Despite its surface beauty a difficult and moving watch,  and a different take on the meaning and significance of soil. And finally .. a chance to get  hands dirty. Almost.  A highly amusing  installation, a kitchen where nature cooks up the soil.  A  tap drips onto limestone, the content of a fruit bowl rot,  a mixer  plays with river sediments. What a discovery ”Soil” is.  And yet  there it is, underneath us every day. As the exhibition sub-title puts it, ‘A world at our feet’. A joy!

There is in fact a book called The gardens of William Morris  (Hamilton, Hart & Simmons 1998) with a very fetching  painting of Kelmscott Manor set in its garden by the Morris’s friend Marie Stillman on the front cover. It is very good on the principles of the Morrisian garden, if we are to believe such a thing exists, connecting it with the distinctive  natural character  of a place, the importance of the  thread of indigenous flora in Morris’s artistic work, and the idea that Morris’s ideal garden contained the essence of the man and his history; ”From his boyhood reading came chivalric scenes and romantic images of knights and ladies in vine-covered bowers. From studying Gerard’s sixteenth century Herball with its woodblock drawings of plants, he retained the  picture of an early garden all cruciform paths and neat raised beds.” The authors are bold enough to set our the principles of Morris’s garden design. They are pretty timeless and make a lot of sense. Basically: unify house and  garden;  enclose the garden with trees, hedges or natural looking fences; preserve local identity; plant simple flowers; eschew fashion; integrate existing trees; make it productive; and, include places for recreation and relaxation. I’d settle for that in any garden of mine.

So does Kelmscott Manor’s garden measure up? It certainly starts off with a number of significant advantages; beautiful house and out buildings made from old stone, those outbuildings including a dovecote, privvy and various barns allow for walls and hedges to seem like the natural order of things, a significant walled garden, some ancient and impressive trees and the space to allow them to thrive rather than feel constrained or too dominant of a small space,  and a certain solitude in the flat, reedy landscape that the house is set in. The entrance, through a  relatively small doorway in the wall leads up to the front door  along a flagstone path  flanked with standard roses – a view familiar to anyone  who has seen a copy of News from Nowhere. That entrance and the layout of the  front  garden certainly met with Morris’s approval, approaching his ideal,  with straight paths and separate ‘rooms’ bounded by old yew hedges. It didn’t take long for Morris to integrate his love of Iceland into the garden, taking his shears to the yew hedge under the gable of the tapestry room and recreating it into a topiary dragon which he named Fafnir after the dragon in The story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876) . It is still there, breathing fire.

Beyond the formal garden, the area of orchard and meadow leading down to a stream  has ash, elm, elder, poplar, and willow along with hawthorn hedging and apple in blossom. Bird life, something Morris cherished and is reflected in his designs – think ‘Strawberry thief’, is in abundance, though the ‘bird apps’ of my companions seemed to be dominated by rooks. Noisy birds! As for the fruit and veg, well the Morris household table was well known for its productive kitchen garden, and in season there were  cherries, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries apples and plums. The modern tea room (in one of the airy stone barns) maintains the tradition, serving  ‘apples quinces, mulberries and damsons’ from the garden. It isn’t hard to see where the mulberries come from. The tree is huge and like many of its species is held together with ropes, props, and ties, to minimise the chances of falling branches killing the visitors.

April is a little too early – even with the remarkably warm and wet winter we have endured, to see the main flower beds in their full glory, though honesty, cammasia, and the grey of cardoon foliage – grey was actually Morris’s favourite colour –  gave a hint of  pleasures to come, and the planting indicated considerable thought as did the fading cowslips and may blossom in the more informal spaces which lit up the Spring. Perhaps the full enjoyment of the  garden requires another visit – nothing wrong with seasons. In News from Nowhere the visitors arrive at ‘the old house’ at the end of their up-river journey, in June. As they raised the latch of the door in the wall, ‘My companion gave a sigh of  pleased surprise and enjoyment;  nor did I wonder, for the garden between the wall and the house was redolent of the June flowers and the roses were rolling over one another with that delicious superabundance of small well-tended gardens which at first sight takes away all thought from the beholder save that of beauty.’ Does Kelmscott today match up to this imaginary space so closely modelled on the 19 century home Morris so cherished?  One hundred and fifty odd years after he first fell in love with it, the answer has to be, yes.

But it is the connection with another William that has particularly intrigued me. William Morris.  As a child he had access to the family copy  of the Herball and studied it closely. He also tended a little garden of his own and learned the names and shapes of plants with the Herball’s help poring over its illustrations. It helped him develop his sense of floral colours, textures, scents, structures, and life cycles and although he was never a garden designer, nor even a great ‘practitioner’ of gardening, he had as Fiona MacCarthy puts it in her comprehensive biography of Morris, ‘a deep appreciation of a garden’s possibilities’.  Of course William’s early interest in individual flower forms is not so surprising in the person who became the most floral of designers.

But this grounding in both plants and the Herball  became far more important later in life as he embraced dyeing in the mid-1870s.  He sent Thomas Wardle a copy of the Herball which he said  contained  ‘useful information about certain disused vegetable dyes’ as he learned about the techniques of dyeing textiles. Before leaving for Leek in Staffordshire where Wardle and his dyeing works were based, he spent two years preparing, mastering the theory while he carried out inital experiments at Queen Square, the family home at the time. His younger daughter May wrote of this time ‘The air at home was saturated with dyeing: bits of madder and indigo lay about, papers of the kermes insect brought home and its habits and customs explained; dyestuffs of the home country would be inquired.’ Gerards Herball would be read out of an evening to the family, and the two girls, Jenny and May, in their early teens at the time, were given their own sets of dyestuffs. Morris himself  was paying extended visits to the Staffordshire works from  early 1876, keen to learn the trade. Suzanne Cooper (in How we might live: at home with Jane and William Morris, a delightful new perspective on the Morris’s lives) characterised it as a typically Morrisian activity ”He was keen to get his hands dirty. His eagerness to plunge into the dye vat  was almost performative – as if he wanted to prove his worth  to the working men who watched him.” Blue to the elbow in smock and clogs. He told Georgie Burne-Jones that he was ‘taking in dyeing at every pore (otherwise by the skin of my hands, which is certain). You know I like that.’ MacCarthy reckons that ‘Blue has a special place in Morris’s colour spectrum. In his poems and his novels it is the sign of happiness, of holidays. Blue was the colour of his working shirts.’

As Cooper remarks it was ‘a time of great inventiveness’. In April 1876  he registered three new textile designs Tulip, Marigold and Larkspur. At the same time Wardle was making trial prints for Columbine a block-printed cotton in muted green and salmon pink. All four patterns  demonstrated the skills that William had learned in designing wallpaper, based on the interplay between flowers and foliage. John Gerard’s Herball was hugely popular when it was first published, and an extended and revised edition (rather more botanically accurate than the first) was published in the 1630s.  Its influence over the centuries has  been  significant. And for me  it has become something I treasure, for its wisdom, the glory of its illustrations, and for the connections it has with geniuses that I admire.

To kick it all off the Cultvate team took on  a ten acre patch of farmland on the Earth Trust estate not far from Didcot. Members and there were a few, were encouraged to support the core team by volunteering at the site. Lord Muck mucked in. But  visits  soon revealed some of the pitfalls in the vision. A large area was devoted to potatoes – hardly a high value crop, and  we were encouraged to come and help harvest. But there was a problem. The variety planted Cara? Arran Pilot? were highly susceptible to eelworm. It soon became apparent that at least 95% of the crop was irreparably damaged and completely unsaleable, and sorting out the final 5% wasn’t worth the trouble. If we found a decent spud we could put it in a bag and take it home with us, gratis. Thin pickings. Complete crop failure. This could have been bad luck – farmers the world over have crop failures, or it could have been a mis-reading of the soil type and previous crops. Another potato variety might have thrived.  I didn’t know. But more pertinently, nor did the Cultivate team. The first experience of vision coming up against reality. Local production in the hands of people who had never farmed before proved to be more challenging than the business plan/prospectus had anticipated. Many other crops, particularly grown in the poly tunnels did well, customers appreciated them, but could they be produced more cheaply than they could be bought in from local suppliers with decades of experience, and scale to match? Basically, no.

On the other hand the VegVan concept looked like a really interesting innovation. Founder member Joe Hasell, a gardener at Worcester College explained it in an interview in the Oxford Times business magazine: ‘We will establish pop-up markets wherever people want one, outside business premises or schools for instance.’ The food sold would come from their smallholding or be bought in from other local suppliers. Member investors who were issued with a membership card could claim 10% off food purchased from the VegVan and the various locations and times were widely advertised. But a significant problem quickly emerged with this too. As time passed reliability at its various stops slipped because the co-op couldn’t afford to keep two vans on the road, one collecting the produce from producers and one selling to the public. The  collection van had to go, and the sales van had to do double shifts, and was getting older.  When it broke down there was no replacement available to cover. So what was its USP apart from selling local fruit and veg from the back of a van? If you wanted sustainable produce, big companies like Riverford or Abel & Cole were happy to oblige and deliver to the doorstep, and if the local dimension and the associated sociability was a premium, then the farmer’s market network could provide.

That this was a problem soon became apparent at a pretty stormy AGM in 2013 ie barely a year into operation. North Aston Organics put in a heartfelt appeal that Cultivate quit acting as a competitor and coordinate with their existing box-scheme. Essentially what local suppliers were finding was that Cultivate was  buying off them and re-selling to their own customers. But sales were good, or at least good enough with the support of volunteer members (around 400 or so investors in all) and the support of various charitable trusts. But as a business model it didn’t work. While staples like potatoes and carrots could be sold at ‘loss leader’ prices in the hope of attracting customers in and then get them to buy the more premium produce at prices to match, those prices put people off. Sales of profitable veg simply didn’t cover the operating costs. An attempt to enter the veg box scheme  didn’t work out  either, as the ‘big boys’ had already cornered most of the market and the infrastructure – vans and delivery drivers as well as a cooled distribution centre were expensive. By 2016 the VegVan (yes, just the one) was showing its age, and the co-op had withdrawn from the Earth Trust smallholding recognising that the lovely veg that could be grown there could also be grown more cheaply, by others locally.

The end didn’t come quickly. The 2018 AGM, the last one Lord Muck attended in person, wasn’t quorate, so the facilitated sessions on ‘brand’, ‘membership’, ‘Cultivate online’ etc had a forlorn sense about them.  Like with so many other  brilliant ideas, the pandemic rang down the final curtain. By late summer 2022 Cutivate had ceased trading, and officially ceased to exist at the end of April.

It is hard to draw lessons. But a few tentative thoughts are:

idealism won out over the nitty-gritty of  getting the job done. Especially in the first few years there was huge emphasis on  quite abstract goals to do with sustainable farming, food security and climate change; the niche of a VegVan was too small to be viable, and as a result Cultivate ended up competing with some of its suppliers and potentially undercutting farmer’s markets; alternatives such as online retailing were tried before being properly thought through. Riverford, Abel & Cole and even very local but already well established outfits like ‘Veg in Clover’, already had the market covered; over reliance on charitable/grant giving trusts masked the underlying problems in the business model and dragged out the final reckoning; and finally, the impact of the cost of living crisis and all the associated responses to an increasingly difficult macro-economic context, perhaps exemplified in the rise of food banks over the past decade, meant that even the relatively affluent demographic that Cultivate appealed to couldn’t or wouldn’t buy enough  produce at the prices they were selling it at. There was a touching, and telling, observation in Cultivate Chair Sarah Flood’s introduction to the 2016 Annual Report, where she characterised the loss that year as ‘We do still need to bump Cultivate over the line to turning a profit, but an extra bag of salad here or an extra bunch of carrots  there, and we’re there..’    Was it all lost for nary a bunch of carrots?

Turnips have an odd  cultural resonance. Ever since ‘Turnip’ Townshend aka Second Viscount Townshend (1674-1738), he of Raynham Hall in Norfolk,  began his agricultural experiments in the early 18 Century, the turnip seems to have acquired a special place in our national story.  His invention of the four crop rotation method: turnips, barley, clover, and wheat, led to a significant  improvement in agricultural production three hundred years ago. But even he considered the turnip crop suitable only as animal feed.  Baldrick  in Blackadder was a big turnip fan, especially if they looked like a ‘thingy’ (they don’t) and had much amusement  serving up especially carved ones that reminded people of ‘their wedding night’. Which proves that they were popular as long ago as medieval times.

In fact they were popular in medieval times when they were referred to as ‘neeps’ as in haggis, tatties and neeps – the only context in which that term is still in use, and Gerard in his Herbal (1597)  refers to ‘small turneeps’ which he considered particularly sweet and tasty, that were grown in the village of Hackney and brought to London for sale in the market at Cheapside. The interesting question is why they fell out of fashion so quickly. Seemingly by the late 17 Century the arrival of new root vegetables such as potatoes and sweet potatoes from the New World displaced them, as well as the rapid increase in sugar production also mainly from the New World, a simpler substitute for the sought after sweetness.

More recently – than the Blackadder series that is, they were a source of abuse, when the England football team lost an international to Sweden in 1999. The Sun’s headline on this humiliating event: ‘Swedes 2 Turnips 1’. But to prove that you can’t keep sex (thank you Baldrick) out of politics, when our ‘blink and you missed her’ Prime Minister Liz Truss  was seeking selection in 2010 for a Tory seat in – where else, Norfolk, and was rumbled to be having an affair, or at least sharing their mutual interest in turnips, with a married Tory MP, her local Association tried to get rid of her – a married woman, sex in the 21 Century, whatever next! The press rode to her rescue, labelling them, what else, but the ‘Turnip Taliban’.  She may have lasted long enough as PM to crash the economy (£40bn and counting)  but her legacy also seems to be to have promoted the hitherto unknown Therese Coffey to Ministerial office (Deputy PM no less) and her skirmish with the ever topical turnip. The Daily Star, having managed to get a lettuce to outlast PM Truss’s tenure, has now started a similar challenge – to see if Coffey can outlast a turnip. As fellow East Anglian grandee ‘Turnip Townsend’ could have told her 300 years ago, that is a risky bet for Coffey. It is no accident they are fed to over wintering livestock – because they last so long!

But sadly, no sound of thundering hooves coming over the dusty horizon, no water company cavalry riding to the rescue. Quite the opposite in fact, as each day trudging down to water, in what felt like an increasingly unproductive ritual, I passed by, no through, a massive water leak from yet another burst mains pipe. Fresh water gushing up  between the cracks in the pavement, splitting the tarmac of the road surface and coursing down the street, forming into gigantic puddles in the depressions in the pavement where the cycletrack meets the pedestrian walkway under the glowering sun. Enough water to turn an allotment site not 30 metres away into a lush and verdant paradise of  fruit trees, flowers and vegetables. Cattle, and those cavalry horses tethered and grazing peacefully in the shade of the hedge. No, the sun must be getting to me, that would be more of a mirage.

But of course that isn’t what happens. Instead, its official. Most of England is experiencing drought, and the debate seems to be whether it is the worst since 1976, for about one hundred years, or since records began.  The TV announcer intones that it has been the driest July since 1885. Meanwhile press reports suggest that in Western Europe the drought is the worst for 500 years as major rivers including the Danube and Rhine dry up, revealing their ‘Hunger stones’ the most famous of which on the Elbe says ‘If you see me, then weep’, rendering these arteries of commerce for centuries, unuseable. And the cure? To ban hose pipes in gardens, allotments, or for the cleaning of cars or windows (unless that is your business of course) from 24 August. Just as the severity of the drought is debated, so too is the percentage of water leaking from those burst mains. Twenty percent? A third? 42%? It depends which company, which year, or how long the timeframe under consideration. For sure the water companies have been promising to tackle leaks, bring down the losses, for the past 20 years. Oddly the percentage of losses from leaks has stubbornly remained the same all that time. But the profits and dividends to shareholders have kept on flowing, gushing even. Corporate PR… rhubarb, rhubarb.

One hundred years later the garden is a joy, visited by thousands of visitors every year. Indeed its five millionth visitor  is expected to  pass through the entrance gate sometime this year. First impressions are of its setting. On a  large sea loch the surrounding area is still pretty wild, even if the nearby village of Poolewe is larger and more commercial than 100 years ago. The loch, the promontory, and the views towards the lofty peaks of Torridon are a spectacular context in which the walled garden, the first element of the estate the visitor encounters, nestles.  Neat rows of flowers and vegetables, and  cordon apple trees trained along the walls are testament to Osgoods original vision, and located with  a southern facing parabolic aspect,  in the sunniest  part of Inverewe. Less expected are the artworks carefully inserted into  this intimate space; James Parker’s  2014 piece Sheltered existence or the wrought iron doors set into stone arches with paths leading down from the garden to the shoreline a few metres away. Coming up through the rockery – again almost on the shoreline and subject to salt spray from frequent winter gales ‘an extremely defiant coastal statement’ as the  interpretation board puts it, the ‘big house’ looms – though nothing like the one Osgood had imagined. That was burned to the ground in 1914 and its much less ambitious replacement by his daughter Mairi Sawyer only completed in 1937. Mairi was key to keeping the spirit of Inverewe alive, and after the death of her husband in 1945, kept the garden going alone during the labour shortages of the post War 1940s, before handing it over to the National Trust for Scotland in 1952.

It is easy to get lost in the Big Trees that surround the house to the north and west, a huge calming space that leads out onto Am Ploc Ard, the High Bluff, and eventually the Devils Elbow and the Cuddy Rock promontory. But nature has intervened. Much of the further parts of the gardens are now inaccessible, thanks to Storm Corrie which tore through the gardens on 29 January this year. Huge trees have been torn up, shattered, their roots pointing skywards, taking with them under-storey and bushes, blocking paths, ponds and watercourses, and turning a spectacular and unique natural environment into something akin to a clear-felled logging site. Not all is lost. Only one third of the garden area at most, was badly affected and the loss of trees allows other plants to grow and new life to colonise those newly-exposed root systems. Older trees were more vulnerable and some would have needed to come down for safety reasons in the next decade anyway. Nature can be brutal in its finality. But of course we all know that such storms are going to become more and more common, and their ferocity on probably already heat or drought-stressed (even in Wester Ross!) habitats, more severe in decades to come. Walking back along the Fictolacteum Walk and up by the Peace Plot (created by Osgood after  the horrors of WWW1)  in the evening sunlight, these reflections on loss and grief make both the vision of Osgood and Mairi, and the tenuous nature of our own existence all the more powerful.