
Once a fortnight we hold a cook club at the Botanic Cottage. Anyone is welcome to join us to learn new cooking skills and to enjoy a healthy meal that’s been freshly prepared by the group. Sadly, the Botanic Cottage is closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but we won’t let that stop us! Cottage Cook Club tutor Ailsa has prepared some great recipes from store cupboard ingredients to encourage us to keep home cooking and keep eating right. Over to Ailsa…

Once a fortnight we hold a cook club at the Botanic Cottage. Anyone is welcome to join us to learn new cooking skills and to enjoy a healthy meal that’s been freshly prepared by the group. Sadly, the Botanic Cottage is still closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but we won’t let that stop us! Cottage Cook Club tutor Ailsa has prepared some great recipes from store cupboard ingredients to encourage us to keep home cooking and keep eating right. Over to Ailsa…

Wangari Maathai who did so much to restore, conserve and campaign for the forest environment for the benefit of local people and their way of life in Kenya and across Africa. Everywhere the natural world is being depleted and habitats lost, Wangari’s life and actions are an inspiration to us all. This article discusses a tree planted in her memory in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and how it came to be. The article was written by Garden Guides, Helen Mitchell and Irene Paterson.

Here in the Community Engagement Team at the Botanics, we’re always interested in living well, eating well, connecting with the natural world, practicing sustainability and reusing, reducing and recycling. You’ll see this in all of our activities, whether it’s the Edible Gardening Project or our fantastic programme at the Botanic Cottage. That’s why each year we take part in St Andrew’s Fair Saturday.

In RBGE Creative Programmes’ exhibition in Inverleith House – Florilegium: A gathering of flowers, there is something for everyone. In the first room downstairs, you can lose yourself in the meticulously skilled detail of botanical paintings and illustrations, which have been contributed from around the world. Upstairs, you can meander from Wendy McMurdo’s Scottish Garden, through a Barbadian sugarcane plantation with Annalee Davis, pausing upon RBGE’s own Herbarium and Centre for Middle-Eastern plants with Lyndsay Mann, and finally travelling through a floral take on 100 days of traditional Taiwanese mourning with Lee Mingwei.

CHERISHED PLAN: The Story of Puck’s Hut at Benmore – Precis by Mike Thornley (Younger Benmore Trust)
Puck’s Hut, the small octagonal building in the Walled Garden at Benmore will be familiar to visitors, but probably few realise that, if buildings spoke, this modest structure…