Spring colour

A beautiful spring day today, so I took my first tentative steps out into the garden. I potted up my tomato seedlings and planted some flower seeds, Lobelia, Salvia, Calendula and some Night Stock. All indoors of course as the frosty nights aren't gone here yet. 

But there were some signs of emerging colour as you can see. The top pic is pretty rubbish as my wee camera isn't too hot at macro shots, but the colour is vibrant. The middle pic is of a young eucalyptus I planted about 18 months ago and it's just shooting up.

The bottom one is a young tree which I planted at the same time and I don't have a clue what it is, but it's bonny, and it's Spring.

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Don't get me wrong, I love Dundee. I'm a Dundonian and proud of it. Trouble is, no other Scottish city has such a history of totally disastrous town planning. Something of a paradox,  given that the Father of Town Planning, Patrick Geddes, was a professor at Dundee University. 

Here's a couple of examples of what I mean. In the top pic, the new building on the right is Dundee Contemporary Arts. Nothing wrong with a Contemporary Arts building being built along contemporary style. But why the hell stick it next to a beautiful old church like that?

The bottom pic is even more criminal, slap bang in the city centre we have another fine old church and look what they put up beside it...... a Mecca bingo hall!.....someone should really have been made to suffer for these atrocities!

Other cities put statues up to famous sons, adventurers, poets and heroes....... what do we have in the city square?....... Desperate Dan!.........doh!

Odd thing is, we can criticise our city with impugnity...... but let any outsider start and that's when the trouble begins. 

Cool car

Now I'm not much of a car person, but I see this wee thing parked at Arbroath Harbour regularly. I love it. Don't know whether it's a restoration job or a kit car or what. Maybe someone can enlighten me. It's cool though.

Morgan Academy

Morgan Academy in Dundee is a secondary school. Designed in 1862 by Edinburgh architects John Dick Peddie and Charles Kinnear, it was opened in 1868 as the Morgan Hospital. This was a charitable institution intended to provide accomodation and education for 'sons of tradesmen and persons of the working class'. The hospital closed in 1888 and was bought by the Dundee Burgh School Board who re-opened it as a school.

In 2001 the school suffered a catastrophic fire which destroyed much of the building. Remarkably, an £18.5 million project has seen it restored to its former glory.

The top two pictures show the fire being tackled and the resultant damage.

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Daffodils, bandstand and bridge

The top pic shows Magdalen Green in Dundee. The bandstand was built in 1890 and is an iconic Dundee image, immortalised by the paintings of James McIntosh Patrick (1907-1998). I took these last weekend, you can just catch the Tay Rail Bridge to the left of the bandstand and the distant Fife skyline.  The bottom pic looks west up the River Tay towards Perth, the bench looked particularly inviting considering the absence of people and dogs, so I took the opportunity for a wee bit of tranquility.

What rhymes with orange?

Took these last month as the sun was going down within about ten or fifteen minutes of each other. Never ceases to amaze me how everything changes so rapidly at sunset.  This was the exact spot looking west to Carnoustie as I posted last week (Where Sea and Sky Collide). The golden/orange  glow makes it look gloriously warm and serene, but it was bloody freezing! I say golden/ orange but I may be wrong as I'm actually colour blind. (seriously folks!) so if my colour descriptions confuse, forgive me.

Click to enlarge for full effect.

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Haar

A ghostly Arbroath Harbour as a sea mist or Haar as it's known in these parts, descends.
According to the Scots Dictionary, haar is a type of cold mist or fog from the North Sea which frequently occurs along the East Coast of Scotland. The word is of Dutch origin coming from either the Middle Dutch word Hare, meaning biting wind, or the Frisian word Harig, meaning damp.

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