Ecologist

This is Leonie Alexander - an ecologist who has worked all over Scotland and is part of the Edinburgh Shoreline project, which aims to engage people in the wonders of their local shoreline and encourage local action to make more space for nature. She was part of an Art Walk workshop at Seafield led by SALT residency artist Tonya McMullan this afternoon that was all about exploring the ecology of Seafield.


Leonie pointed out just how many interesting plants there were on a little patch of apparently scrubby wasteland, between the Prom and the beach itself. She identified a range of plants and told us more about them, whether they were native plants or introduced species. I was interested to see Burdock plants - forever paired with Dandelion in my head after the Yorkshire fizzy drink. It was a feature of my childhood, when we visited my Yorkshire grandparents - bottles of Ben Shaw's 'pop'. She also pointed out Oxford Ragwort - a plant with a great story in the UK as it escaped from the Oxford Botanic Gardens and spread across the country, using the nineteenth century rail network. More recently it has continued its spread along the gravel edges of roads. And also a recently planted grass from New Zealand which grows tall stems and long flowers which are favoured by a particular bird in NZ which has a beak that allows it to get into the flowers.
We also heard from marine conservationist Lyle Boyle who is part of the Restoration Forth project as one of two Seagrass Restoration Officers. He told us about the project to try and restore the seagrass meadows in the Forth, linked to encouraging the return of Forth oysters. There used to be massive oyster beds in the Forth - fifty square miles - but they were harvested to exhaustion. In the late eighteenth century as many as 30 million oysters were taken every year. Given that a single oyster can filter 200 litres of water a day, that is a lot of water purification which was lost.


After the ecology lessons, Tonya led the group in creating bottles of fragrant mist sprays and some drawing and painting of plants and ground level details.