• IN THE GARDEN •
• IN THE GREENHOUSES •
Life, with the garden
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland • • • Visit: June 2013
I went with my father to Edinburgh, as the very first stop on my 2013 trip through Europe. Edinburgh was grey and full of tourists, but I also liked it. There is something about Scotland.
But the absolutely best part of Edinburgh was the Garden. Botanic gardens are systematic. Sometimes that makes them feel stiff and constraining. But not Edinburgh Royal Botanic Garden.
It is vast, but it is planned around thematic areas, surrounded by patches of trees, which creates surprise and a sense of adventure. Every time you walk around a bend in the path, a new creation of flowers, shrubs and trees meet you. It gives you a sense of wilderness, but also of something meticulously planned and intense. The level of detail. Edinburgh is not a very colorful city otherwise, but in the Garden you are met by an explosion of color. Completely free of charge.
I could have walked around there for days.
I love the greenhouses in Edinburgh. They are like little universes, each created as a little, intensified piece of different places on Earth. Artificial, of course, but still. A place to marvel in. On a wall-length poster by the entrance, the following quote was posted: “Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal (Edward Wilson)”.
And of course, I couldn’t get enough of the leaves and flowers in the greenhouses and in the Garden. And since I’m not planning on becoming a professional photographer anymore, I’ve decided not to care about the banality of taking photos of flowers.
But the real reason for me and dad going to Scotland, was for dad to research a reportage about wave and tidal energy innovations being tested in the Orkney Islands, north of the Scottish mainland.
When I was little, I used to travel with my dad a lot. He was the editor of the travel pages in a big newspaper, and took me with him on his trips now and again. I’ve been all over, helping him find a good story: sailing past white coral beaches on Zanzibar, crawling through wartime tunnels in Vietnam, riding roller-coasters in Disneyland in Paris and standing in a never-ending line to get up into the Empire State Building in New York. However, since the London trip that in the end never turned into anything due to the terrorist attacks in the underground just a couple of weeks before the piece was to be published, I’ve not been anywhere with dad. He quit the travel pages, and later even quit the newspaper, and now he freelances, writing stories about renewable energy, mostly.
So, that might explain why this trip to Scotland felt both familiar and quite strange. I’m older now, and have traveled a great deal by myself, which means that my dad isn’t the all-knowing travel editor anymore. I’ve got my own set of experiences that make me into a competent traveler. And, most importantly in this case, I have a driver’s license. My dad does not. So obviously, that was the main argument for why I should tag along on this trip. I was the driver. But these things combined also made it so plain for me that I’m an adult now. There are things that I know and can do, that my dad can’t. It felt kind of nice.
I’ve also never seen my dad doing interviews. One rarely does proper interviews when researching for a travel piece. And I don’t really know how interviews are supposed to be made, but seeing my dad with his piles of research, preparing questions, knowing all these technical engineering terms (generally, my dad is very much not a science person – he is rather a humanities kind of guy), it made me realize how competent he is. Not that I didn’t know that before, I just hadn’t seen it in action.
It’s kind of the same experience as the one I had in April, traveling around Liberia with mom. Seeing the way she could talk with anybody, asking them just the right questions to make them relax, even though she was this white stranger arriving in a huge embassy car.
Both my parents are very much what they do, and these last couple of months I’ve seen them in action, doing their thing. They’re not just my mom and dad, they’re professionals too. And I must say that they’re impressive.
And, with the undulating hills grazed by sheep and cows, and sudden steep cliffs falling into the Atlantic, the islands are a place of extremes. It is a beautiful place, Orkney. Despite the rain – or rather, because of it.
Katja Malmborg 