Nature Notes by Ewen Sim
St Mark's
Nature Notes
Reflections by Ewen and Margot-the-blue-staffie
Blackbirds sing
On an evening constitutional with Margot, the shadows were growing long and the blackbirds were doing what blackbirds do at dusk — singing from every rooftop and treetop as if they owned the place.
Just as we turned into the gateway of Holyrood Park, something caught my eye. A hedgerow woven through with white rose flowers. And at that hour, in the cooling air, the scent was extraordinary. Powerful and sweet and fragrant. So I did what any sensible person would do — stopped dead, buried my nose in the nearest bloom, and forgot entirely where I was going.
An old chap nearby was watching me with a smile on his face. Do they smell good? he asked. I told him what I believe to be true — you should always take time to stop and smell the roses.
I love the smell of roses. I’m sure I’m not alone. I have rose-scented Faith in Nature body wash. I am entirely unashamed about my fondness for rose Turkish delight. And years ago, Janine and I on one of our first dates and drove through the night to Alexandra Palace to see Amma — the Indian spiritual teacher sometimes called the hugging saint, who has embraced millions of people around the world. As she drew me in for a hug, there was an unmistakable scent of rose oil, warm and soft. She is famous for it.
The rose has been woven into human mythology for as long as anyone can remember. In Hindu tradition, the god Vishnu formed his bride Lakshmi entirely from rose petals — over a thousand of them. In Celtic folklore, fairies were said to favour roses above all flowers, fashioning crowns and garlands from them. Perhaps fitting that I found them at a gateway — since in the old stories, wherever fairies gather, a threshold between worlds is never far away.
But the rose has always carried a duality. The petal and the thorn. Beauty and sharpness arriving together in the same plant. There is a Buddhist saying I find particularly honest: the stinking pit and the fragrant rose are two aspects of the same existence. Sit with that for a moment. The rose doesn’t apologise for its thorns. It simply offers both, and lets you decide how close you want to get.
Which is perhaps exactly what stopping and smelling the roses is really about. To pause whatever you are doing. To arrive fully in the present moment. To let the senses do what senses are for. Just to stand there in the cooling evening air and let it be extraordinary.
Margot, for her part, had her nose in the hedge for entirely different reasons.
But we both stopped. And that was enough.
Life and death in the same breath
On Thursday evening, after voting, Princess Margot and I set out on our evening walk. It was, depending on your perspective, either a glorious festival of flowers or a hay fever sufferer’s worst nightmare. Periwinkle, bluebell, red campion, clematis. The gorse still doing its luminous thing on Salisbury Crags — there’s a saying that when gorse is out of blossom, kissing’s out of fashion, which means, encouragingly, almost never, since gorse flowers throughout the year.
But presiding over all of it, unmistakably, was the hawthorn. White clouds of blossom in every hedgerow and hillside. The hawthorn is also called the May-tree, which brings us to the old saying: never cast a clout till May is out. A clout, in case you were wondering, is an old word for clothing. The debate about whether “May” means the month or the blossom has been running in newspaper letters pages since at least the 1930s, but the more poetic interpretation holds that you shouldn’t leave your coat behind until the hawthorn is flowering. And there’s sound ecological logic to it: hawthorn is considered a very accurate predictor of the end of frosts — it won’t flower until the danger has passed. The tree itself, in other words, is telling you it’s finally safe.
I do have a soft spot for the hawthorn. In early spring, when it’s just coming into leaf, I like to eat the young shoots as I walk. Apparently I’m in good company: country people used to call this bread and cheese — a free snack from the hedgerow, tender and slightly nutty, tasting of the season just beginning.
But as I was walking I kept catching something on the air — a faint sweetness with a darker edge, something slightly funky and decaying. It turned out to be the hawthorn itself. The blossom contains a chemical called trimethylamine, which is also produced in decaying animal tissue. In earlier centuries, when the dead were laid out at home for several days before burial, people knew that smell intimately. No wonder they considered it bad luck to bring it indoors.
There was something fitting about that, walking with a dog through an Edinburgh evening thick with flowers. Life and death in the same breath. A reminder that May’s abundance isn’t separate from the rest of the cycle — it’s part of it. The hawthorn gives us food, a weather forecast, and a faint smell of mortality tucked inside its blossom. It’s been doing this for a very long time. And sometimes all it takes to feel connected to that long thread of time is a Thursday evening walk, a dog pulling at the lead, and pinning back the senses to notice what’s around you.
Although you don’t necessarily need the dog.
The last snow of the season
Look up this coming Sunday the 26th of April and you’ll find the moon in her First Quarter phase – just over 70% illuminated and waxing. In the Celtic Tree Calendar, we are deep in the month of Saille — the Willow Moon, running from April 15th to May 12th, pronounced Sahl-yeh. It is deeply tied to the cycles of the moon and water, symbolising adaptability and emotional healing. A fitting moon under which to stand beneath a canopy of pink petals and simply look up.
Because right now, down on The Meadows, one of Edinburghs greatest annual spectacles is in full bloom. The avenue of cherry trees has become a luminous pink tunnel — blossom so dense it seems almost improbable, as though the trees have been saving themselves all winter for exactly this moment. Phones are out, selfies are being taken, children are running through the falling petals, and everyone is smiling. This is Edinburgh doing joy.
There is a lovely expression, likely borrowed from Japanese tradition, that cherry blossom is the last snow of the season. Watch a gust of wind move through the canopy and you’ll understand why — petals lift and drift and spiral down in pale pink flurries, settling on paths and grass in soft drifts. It looks just like snow and is just as fleeting. Gone within days if the wind gets up or the rain moves in. Worth getting out for while it lasts.
Scotland has its own wild cherry too, known as the gean — a name which shares its roots with guigne, the French word for a type of sweet cherry. Geans grow across Scottish woodlands, often appearing singly or in small clusters at the woodland edge, and their spring blossom display gave them a distinctly mysterious quality in Highland folklore. To encounter one was considered auspicious and fateful. There is also the bird cherry — hag berry in Scots dialect — its wilder, more heavily-scented cousin. Folklore from north-east Scotland warned against using bird cherry wood for any purpose, as it was regarded as a witches tree.
In Japan the annual festival of Hanami brings families together to celebrate beneath the blossom every spring, a tradition that honours both beauty and its brevity. And that brevity is the whole point. The Japanese have a phrase for the feeling that cherry blossom reliably produces: mono no aware — pronounced moh-no no ah-wah-reh. It translates most closely the pathos of things, an empathy toward things though neither quite captures it. A looser but perhaps truer rendering is the bittersweet awareness of impermanence — the idea that something is more precious, not less, because it will not last. The thing is, you don’t need to know the word to feel it. Stand under those trees on The Meadows, watch the petals come down, and something shifts — a quiet, almost inexplicable tug that sits somewhere between joy and wistfulness. That’s mono no aware. The Japanese simply had the good sense to name it.
Go soon. The last snow of the season never stays long.
Rosemary
Walking through Marchmont after last Sunday’s I noticed a rosemary bush beginning tentatively to flower. And that same rosemary – a large branch of it – was used by the rector at St Columba’s easter service to splash the congregation with blessed water. I notice she intentionally missed out Janine and I.
Rosemary has always played a part in my life. My mother is called Rosemary. And we played that song: Love grows where my Rosemary goes. Perhaps that is its own kind of old magic. The old name for rosemary is dew of the sea – from the Latin ros marinus, because sea spray would settle on coastal plants like morning dew. The Celts believed the threshold between salt water and fresh was a thin place. Rosemary grew there.
It is the herb of remembrance. In the old stories, it lined the manger where the Christ child lay. Medieval folk scattered it on church floors at Christmas, not just for the scent, but because rosemary kept evil from the door at life’s great passages: birth, marriage, death. When Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest, rosemary lay upon her casket.
And here is the wonder. Science now whispers what the old herbalists always knew: rosemary contains a substance called 1,8-cineole. Inhale it – brush past a bush, crush a needle between finger and thumb – and it works upon the brain. Studies show it improves cognitive performance and memory speed. It is kin to the medicines used for those who are losing their hold on remembering.
Is it not a beautiful thing? That a plant used for remembrance actually helps the brain to remember. The old world did not need the science. They just walked through the herb garden and breathed.
As the moon fades towards darkness, and the gorse blazes yellow on the crags, may you find your own rosemary.
Breathe it in. And remember what your bones already know.
The Paschal Moon and the Patience of a Staffie
This week, on the second of April, the full moon rose. Not just any moon, but the Budding Moon, the New Shoots Moon, the Seed Moon. Under her light, the countryside sheds its bare bones. What was dormant now stirs: buds break from twigs, and seeds dropped last autumn finally feel the warmth and the lengthening light, cracking open their hulls to begin.
This is also the Paschal Moon—the first full moon after the spring equinox, the ancient clock by which Easter is still reckoned. A moon of threshold and reckoning.
The day of that moon, Margot the Staffordshire bull terrier found a large log in a small, nondescript wood on St Leonard’s Crag. And as anyone who knows a Staffie will tell you, you cannot separate her from a good chew. You simply wait. You wait until the madness of joy runs its course. So I stood, hands in pockets, and surrendered to the waiting.
In that forced pause, I began to see.
There were the flowers of comfrey, nodding bells of cream and mauve, which the old folk called bone mend for their knitter of flesh and sinew. And the fresh, lime-green leaves of hawthorn, so tender you could almost see through them. The ancient Celts named these the bread of the wood, and they are good for the heart—both the muscle and the seat of sorrow. A handful chewed, they say, steadies the pulse.
Above, the ash tree had just begun to flower: tiny brushes of a purple so deep it appears black, as if the tree were writing in ink against the sky.
The birds were singing. I listened properly, not trying to make it pretty. The blue tit made a dry, scratchy tss-tss-tss-tchurr, like someone dragging a twig across grit. The great tit called teacher-teacher — two notes, high then low, metallic and insistent. The bullfinch gave a single soft pewevery few seconds, barely louder than a breath. The chaffinch rattled off a fast, descending chip-chip-chip-chip-trrrr, ending in a flick. The robin sang cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up — a bright, repetitive phrase, each verse slightly different. The dunnock, hiding low in the brambles, produced a thin, hurried jangle — tizz-tizz-tizz-trrr — mechanical, unmusical, easy to miss. And the wood pigeons sat in breeding pairs, big as grey pineapples, absurdly weighing down branches far too small for them, cooing a deep, slow coo-COO-coo, the same three notes over and over.
And here in Edinburgh, this same first week of April, the city is waking too. On the Water of Leith, the first ramsons—wild garlic—are pushing through, their green spears already scenting the air. In the Royal Botanic Garden, the magnolias are unfurling their goblets, and along the shaded paths of the Dean Cemetery, the first wood anemones have opened, white as fallen petals of the Paschal Moon itself.
Sometimes, when life—or a Staffie with a log—gives you a forced opportunity to wait, take it. Slow down. Listen. See, really see. Feel the breeze. Feel the early spring sun, still tentative but kind.
The world is not rushing. Only we are.
St Mark's
A place called home
St Mark's Unitarian Church at Castle Terrace, Edinburgh, has been our meeting place for almost two hundred years. We also meet via Zoom and you can connect with us through social media (Facebook and Twitter).
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