Inverleith

So I've stayed in this area for over 20 years and I used to be a youth worker and I also worked on a market garden for a couple of seasons, but...

Hi, I live in a top flat, don't have a garden, and we've been thinking about, well, I could go on the allotment waiting list, but the closest ones are Inverleith Park, which is not very close, and Tanya Waiting List, famously.

But then, yeah, just realising that this area has got loads of land, and it all used to be farmland before the housing was built in the 1930s.

So I've been involved since the very start of these community gardens.

There is the steepled city rising over its ridges and dropping down its valleys like billows of a troubled ocean; and there, too, is the enveloping sweep of suburbs dotted with villas or cross-thatched with streets of workingmen's cottages; and farther still the meadows and their archery grounds, the furzy hills of Braid and their golf links, Blackford Hill whence Marmion and his bard looked down on "mine own romantic town," and on the southern horizon the heathery Pentlands, low and shaggy, with the kine that graze over them low and shaggy too.

To the northward, away beyond the cricket greens of Inverleith Park, the blue Firth sparkles in the offing, dotted with fleet steamers and the white spread sails of stately ships laying course for the Baltic.

In the distance over Leith looms the tall lighthouse on the Inchcape Rock that Southey made famous with a ballad.

Beyond the west end of the city a wavy blue line marks the course seaward of the bustling Little Water of Leith, where David Balfour kept tryst with Alan Breck; and many a sturdy little brig leaps across it as it hurries along, "brimmed," wrote Stevenson, "like a cup with sunshine and the song of birds." Still farther to the westward, where the old Queen's ferry coach road appears as a faint white tracing, within many a mile of Edinburgh town thin vapours of smoke rise from the chimneys of white cottages on peasant greens by brook-sides.