Open Parks and Gardens
May 26th, 2007 by Ian
I am a little behind on posting, as Oana always seems to beat me to it. So I’ll start by expanding a bit on her post about the open parks and gardens day on May 5. It was a little while ago but as a free event it deserves all the free advertising I can give it.
In Vancouver, private parks and gardens are the exception rather than the rule. In Edinburgh, things are changing and public parks and gardens are becoming more and more common but private parks and gardens are still very common. When you walk around town you may notice that green areas are often surrounded by cast iron fencing with locked gates. In some cases you can pay a £20 fee per year for a key; in other cases you have to belong to some type of club or organization; in others, you have to live in one of the adjacent buildings in order to access a small piece of green space close to your building or area of work.
Parks & Gardens Open Day gives the residents of Edinburgh a chance to go out and see parks and gardens that they would normally not be able to without fees, friends or VIP status. One of the gardens was last open to the public over 130 years ago.
Each year a guide is published with a listing and short description of each garden or park participating in the program. This year there were about 50 parks and garden participating. To ensure we got the most out of the day, we started by preselecting and scheduling which places to see in what order. We decided to front-of-the-line places that gave guided tours and places that we would not normally be able to see.
In the end we decided on Calton Hill and Princes Street Gardens which both promised behind the scenes tours, and left the middle of our day open to places that were within walking distance of these sites.
Designed based on the Athens Acropolis, Edinburgh’s National Monument was never completed but still provides for a very interesting skyline and complements the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill.
It is unfortunate that the open parks and gardens’ guide didn’t give very detailed descriptions about what each tour would feature, but we were both pleasantly surprised that we were admitted to the top of the Nelson Monument gratis and were given an inside tour of the city observatory which is normally closed to members of the public.
The Princes Street garden tour, while very good, was a little bit disappointing as the gardener who would have given us the behind the scenes tour was doing a different garden tour that day, and we were left with a standard tour by one of the park rangers. The tour was nonetheless first rate but we could have done it at a different time is on every Thursday night in the summer. If we’d known we would have gone to a different garden that is not accessible the rest of the year. Below is the ape in the rock from the Castle rock face at the south end of Princes Garden.
