A Place Like Edinburgh

For this week's MindLetter, I visited Edinburgh across time and space...

I first discovered Dr Neil’s Garden in Duddingston in summer 2022, when I went to meet its artist in residence, Brigid Collins, and her poet colleague Christine De Luca. The garden was founded by local doctors Andrew and Nancy Neil in the 1960s as a place of respite for their patients, for gentle gardening or breathing in the air. Sixty years on, it is one of Edinburgh’s hidden treasures. Nestled at the foot of Arthur’s Seat and right by Duddingston Kirk, the garden is walled on three sides and faces Duddingston Loch on the other. In its soils grow gingko and grape hyacinth, apricot and fir, thicket rose and viburnum. In winter, the dogwood glows and the water at the bank of the loch freezes over; in summer, goslings lurk under the willow, and marsh marigold and iris glimmer in the reeds.

It is a picturesque place, and for this alone it makes sense that Brigid and Christine would choose to spend a year of seasons, spring to winter, in quiet contemplation of the garden’s trees and shrubs, bumblebees and catkins. Their work formed part of a Templeton grant on art and spirituality hosted at the Divinity School. Brigid worked in watercolours and pastels and Christine in verse, capturing colours, shadows and entanglements in the place’s ecology, their work a conversation of artistic process. When I joined, it was to draw some of this out, to observe artist and poet and their relationship with each other, garden and ground.

As I pored over paintings and poems, writing meditations on what I saw, I was struck by the connections and distinctions that emerged in their work. Brigid had begun with a ‘specimen’ gaze, drawing plants as individuals, but she gravitated during the year towards replicating them in all their wild tangles of shoots and fronds and branches. As her work draws out this mutuality between plants, so too it makes plants ever more distinctive from ourselves: while Brigid might sit in the garden capturing plant lives, half-shrouded in creeper, hop shadows falling on her paper, the humans will always eventually go home. The painting of the rosehips will always be a thing apart from the fleshy material of this rosehip, in this place, even as it draws us in, asking us to look closer, for longer.

It seemed to me that the deeper artist and poet looked at and into the garden, the more revealed itself not only about the garden, but also about art; indeed, that the exertion of attention – an attention that was disciplined and full of care – was central to the artistic process. What Brigid and Christine uncovered was both universal, art as a way of attending to, appreciating and coming to know a place; and also specific, the life and time of one very located place: Dr Neil’s Garden, in all its particularity of rock and earth and loch, its brooding geese in summer and skies in winter, a cycle ride away from us in Edinburgh.

This past weekend I found myself immersed in place once more, at the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition on Alfred Buckham. Buckham was a pioneer of early aerial photography – his first photographs appeared around 1918 – and he took to the skies all over the world in a plane, often half hanging out of the cockpit, camera in hand. Known as a daredevil, he photographed in dramatic weather conditions, in the heart of storms or on the edge of active volcanoes, but his photos capture the imagination most for their vantage point upon places. The city of London or Oxford or Edinburgh spreads out in gorgeous sepia, the first time they had been seen by mankind from that viewpoint.

Buckham, who started out wanting to be a painter in the style of Turner, returned to Edinburgh more than anywhere else. He spoke about wanting his audience to feel what he felt, up there in the clouds looking down upon the castle or the Forth Bridge or the Pentlands. The photographs themselves were carefully-crafted composites, about which he was always transparent. At that moment in time the technology was incapable of replicating clouds and landscape in one picture, because of the different exposure times needed for sky and ground, and so Buckham harnessed a library of around two thousand images of clouds, matching them meticulously to the light on the land as he crafted each photograph. He might provide a key accent in chalk, demonstrating his painter’s eye; a print of an aircraft, to make you feel that you were up in the air with them, finished the look.

While it is tempting to feel deflated upon discovering that Buckham’s pictures are as much artistry as exact replica, the results are breath-taking. Edinburgh castle sings, and the Firth of Forth gleams; the Pentlands are rendered in snowy majesty. Buckham’s attention to detail, his own palpable love of the place, commands the eye a hundred years later. His careful execution of light on a bulwark or cumulus above a soaring aircraft makes the stomach lurch in both dizziness and joy. He takes us high up into the skies of Scotland, but also invites us how to think about the relationship between human and art: it is not about slavish copy, but rather a communing, a will to capture the spirit of something, to make you see it in all its aliveness.

As the sun comes out, and green shoots, promising daffodils, punctuate purple and white crocuses in parks and gardens, so we too begin to stir from the wind-bitten somnolence of an Edinburgh winter. Spring is a time to look around, to remind ourselves where we are, and also to marshal our attention for what the year asks of us. For to attend, with the discipline and care of sketches under tendrils, or hands on camera frosted from the ice of a journey above the clouds, is to bring the best of our humanity to the place we’re in.

Warm wishes,

Kitty

Explore Brigid and Christine’s work, now published as Such Fragile Futures: An Artist and a Poet Reflect in a Garden, and in my accompanying booklet Of Mutual Things: Observations in Four Parts, from Main Point Books.

Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer runs at the National Portrait Gallery daily, 10am-5pm, until Sunday 19th April.