Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

Lauriston Castle

We drove out on Saturday afternoon to Edinburgh's Lauriston Castle, which overlooks a narrow stretch of sea known as the Firth of Forth that coils out towards the North Sea. A misty mile or so across the water were the patchwork fields and hills of Fife, rising up from the sea. Poor, impoverished Fife is the butt of many an Edinburgh joke. "Best viewed from a distance," goes one saying. 'NFF' or 'Normal for Fife' is a cheeky medical term to describe alcohol and tobacco intake most of us would consider wildly excessive. Yet despite the reputed disappointment of its close-up reality, Fife offers a tantalising vista to all who live this side of the Forth.

On this misty Saturday Lauriston was grey, Edwardian and mysterious, untouched by time, as if pre-war beauties and their beaus might at any minute stroll through the clipped box hedges, past the Italianate rose garden, for a spot of tea on the lawns. Fittingly, the place turned out to be home to several croquet lawns (pictured above), not, it must be said, a sport I have ever had previous reason to associate with Scotland.

It wasn't just the croquet that reminded me of England. In places the grounds were almost as lush and verdant as the English countryside, testimony to the wet 'summer' we've been having up here.

Beautiful, mature trees - horse chestnut, cedar, oak and monkey puzzle - were dotted thickly across the grounds. Inspired by frequent visits to the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh, I'm learning more about trees from a small book from Dorling Kindersley. The trouble is matching up towering great trees with the little pictures in the book. The guide does have a little stick figure drawing next to its tree pictures, to show the scale, but I can't as yet always translate that to the jumbled mass of branch, trunk and leaf in real life.

Almost as unexpected as the untypically Scottish croquet lawns was stumbling on a beautiful Friendship Garden created in the castle's grounds to celebrate Edinburgh's links with the Japanese city of Kyoto. Formal, yet peaceful, that garden was more relaxing than aromatherapy, massage or The Bean's Baby Lullabies CD. Helped by two recent viewings of the film Lost in Translation, I managed to identify some Japanese cherry trees there, which made me happy. Soon I'll become a paid-up tree spotter with anorak, measuring tape and notebook.

The Bean was entranced by the pebbles in the 'dry' garden, which required some methodical sorting, examination and tentative licking before she allowed me to replace them.

The Mad Hatter would have felt quite at home inviting guests to a tea party in the grounds of Lauriston Castle. The Queen of Hearts could have held court, while the yew trees came to life and watched her preside over a ghostly game of croquet on the lawns, played perhaps by some of the castle's stone lions that she had ordered back to life for the occasion.

Posted 24 June 2007 23:12

Daughter Edinburgh Out and about

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