The Scottish gardens and the flowers made it hard not to stop every two minutes and smell them. You can be quite a long time on a walk at that rate. They are colourful, cheerful, and as "scottish" as you would picture them to be. The garden that touched me the most was the Queen Mother's Memorial Garden in Edinburgh, which is part of the Botanical Gardens. There was a labrynth made of little hedges in the shapes of E's. Walking in the quiet of this garden was a very spiritual time for me, as I felt a real sense of being accompanied and a divine feeling of love. Mostly I was reminded of God's beauty everywhere, as I encountered all kinds of flowers in the many places I visited, despite the fact that it was end of October and early November. What I would call summer beauty still greeted me: in the Scottish gardens in Glasgow, in the Edinburgh and Glasgow Botanical Gardens, in front of tenements or flats and Scottish homes, in Skye by the harbour village of Portree and the open valley space of Glen Coe, and outside the restaurant where we had the amazing fish! I wish I could tell you the names of these beauties--more investigation for another time!
