Amanda Thomson: Mainly in Sinuosities

bird's foot trefoil Sc. craw’s taes, catcluke ‘Named from some fanciful resemblance it has to a cat or a bird’s foot’; fell-bloom; used to make a yellow dye.

coltsfoot Sc. tushalagy, tushy-lucky-gowan The leaves were sometimes smoked instead of Tobacco; hairs from young leaves sometimes used as tinder.

bracken Sc. rannoch Used as a packing material, and for protecting the potato crops from frost; bedding for animals.

Produces a yellow dye. Bracken rhizomes were thought to cause ‘the trembles’ in sheep; burned to make potash, and used to make soap.

daisies Sc. cockieloorie Used to treat toothache and eye problems, the roots and leaves were sometimes used to treat rheumatism and gout.

brambles Sc. drumlie-droits Bramble leaves were used to treat bacterial infections, and their roots for asthma and bronchitis. Kenicer writes ‘Withering (1776) notes that 'the berries when ripe are black, and do not eat amiss with wine. The green twigs are of great use in dying woollen, silk and mohair black’. broad leaved dock Sc. docken Used to treat nettle stings, and the roots were made into a paste to treat bee-stings, and mixed with vinegar and lard to treat burns. butterbur Its large leaves were used to wrap butter. common nettle Sc. heg-beg Delicious as a broth! It was used as a tonic, to curdle milk, to make fibre and flax. A cure for rheumatism and muscular pain; ‘thought to cleanse the blood and rejuvenate the body after the deprivations of winter’.

dandelions Sc. deil’s milk plant, witch gowan, doon-head-clock Roots can be used as a coffee substitute, the roots can alleviate stomach disorders; thought also to ease hangovers, and cleanse the blood.

what was Port Hamilton & Port Hopetoun

dock Sc. docken The water dock, found by the sides of rivers, often cut, dried and used as eldin, or fuel, by the lower classes. Witching docken, a name given by old women to tobacco. Broad leaved dock was used to treat nettle stings, and the roots were pounded into a past to treat bee-stings, and mixed with vinegar and lard to treat burns. Its large leaves were used to wrap butter.

hoary mustard (runchies)

elder Sc. bourtree, eller Used to make cordial, to aid indigestion, to keep witches at bay, and to encourage second sight in those prone to it. Its wood can be used to make whistles, and turned into taps for tapping birch or as stems of pipes.

colts-foot (tushy-lucky-gowan) wall barley goosegrass (witherspail)

hart’s tongue red campion (cancer) red valerian

hawthorn rowan (quicken) jackdaws (kays)

comma butterfly

bracken groundsel

tenements built 1899 orange tip butterflies

blackbirds

field horsetail bittersweet

tufted vetch (pitch-pea) cow parsley (shepherd’s needle)

sparrows (sprauchs, spugs)

slender st. john’s wort (aaron’s beard)

butterflies (butteries) comma butterfly

the tortoiseshell butterfly (deil’s butterfly)

whitethroats

chiffchaffs wrens (vrans, kitty-wrens)

greenfinches

knapweed (horse-knot)

yellow flag iris (cheiper)

site of Hailes quarry

white clover (claver) ox-eye daisies (horse-gowan)

bugle

groundsel

Bridge 6a red clover (plyvens, poverty-pink)

crosswort cowslip (cow’s mouth)

foxglove (deidman’s bells)

thyme leaved speedwell

shepherd’s purse (mither’s heart)

meadow-sweet (lady of the meadows, meadow queen)

elder ladies bedstraw (the yellow bedstraw)

stone post views towards Craiglockhart

tormentil (eard-bark)

yellow rattle (gowk’s shillings)

cuckooflower (cock’s caim, meadow pinks, ladies’ smock) yarrow (thoosand-leaved-clover)

watermint common sorrel (soorocks, ranty-tanty)

silverweed (moss-corns, dog-tansy) dunnocks

great tits (ox-e’en)

butterbur

swallows (arondells)

song thrush (mavis)

gipsywort

goldfinches (goldies)

curled dock (docken)

bindweed (deil’s gut)

dandelions (deil’s milk plant)

ground elder

broad leaved dock (docken)

fumintory

Kingsknowe bridge

mugwort (muggart, muggins)

wood avens

daisies (gowans, cockie-loorie) brambles (drumlie-droits)

blackcaps

(gowany, abounding in daisies)

tuberous comfrey

dandelions (witch gowan)

willow warblers

french-butterfly, the common white butterfly

guelder rose (water-elder)

black headed gulls

mile marker

meadow vetchling (teers)

Slateford Road

moorhens

pineapple weed

pignut (arnut)

corn marigold (manelet)

indian balsam ribwort plantain (rippling gerss)

ear lichen

creeping buttercup (yellow gowan) bird’s foot trefoil (catcluke, coo’s-cloos)

water forget-me-not toadflax (mither o’ thousands)

white dead nettle (day nettle)

blue tits common nettle (heg-beg) mute swans

Viewforth Bridge

sow thistle (swine-thistle)

duckweed (duke’s meat)

sycamore mallards

kestrel (willie whip-the-wind)

ragwort (stinking willie) creeping thistle ragweed (bunweed)

ash

magpies (pegpies, pyats)

orange tip butterfly

Lochrin Basin

black mustard (scaldricks)

dandelion (doon-head-clock) hazel

herb robert

mugwort (muggart, muggers)

zig zag clover wall rue

buddleia

dragonflies (deil’s darning needles)

chaffinch (shilfas)

hawthorn Sc. haw-buss Important in our hedgerows, sometimes known as the May Tree, it tells you when to stop wearing your winter clothes - ‘ne’er cast a cloot ‘til May is oot’. hazel Sc. hissel Thought to be the best wood for water divining.

ragwort Sc. Stinking weed, stinking davies Used to make a yellow dye. Previously, witches were believed to ride around on their stems.

ladies bedstraw Sc. Yellow bedstraw The tops were used to make bedding, and to curdle milk. The roots were used to make a red dye.

sorrel Sc. ranty tanty Used to be used to treat scurvy. Its roots were used to make a red dye.

meadowsweet Sc. Queen of the meadows Strewn on the floor to ‘mask the smell of unwashed bodies and livestock...this temporary carpet could then simply be swept out the door and replaced’.

Used as a painkiller.

St John’s wort* Sc. Aaron’s beard ‘Formerly believed by the superstitious to be a charm against the dire effects of witch-craft and enchantment’. Slender St John’s Wort can cure second sight and protect against evil spirits. Used as a cough remedy, to ease post-natal depression and as an anti-depressant.

mugwort Sc. bowlochs, muggart Was used as a tea, and as a flavouring in beer.

Carrying mugwort was thought to prevent fatigue.

Bluchtan, a piece of the hollow stem of a mugwort, used as a pop-gun red clover Sc. poverty-pink, plyvens. Sook, soukies the flowers of the red clover, sucked by children.

peacock butterfly

white clover Sc. curl doddy, claver ‘White clover was an impromptu snack for children – the heads would be plucked and the nectar sucked from them’.

yarrow Sc. thoosan-leaved-clover traditionally used To heal wounds and stop bleeding. Used in some Gaelic-speaking parts of Scotland to divine future lovers. yellow flag iris Sc. cheiper, cheeper So called because children make a shrill noise with its leaves.

witches’ thimbles, the flower of the foxglove * St John’s wort can have dangerous interactions with other medicines.

Sources for above Jamieson, J. J., A Dictionary of the Scottish Language. Edinburgh, William Tait, 1846.

Greg Kenicer, Scottish Plant Lore, an illustrated flora, Royal Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, 2018 William Milliken and Sam Bridgewater, Flora Celtica, Birlinn, 2013 Warrack, Alexander. A Scots Dialect Dictionary. Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1911 Text paragraphs: The Ministers of the Respective Parishes…. New Statistical Account, Vol. 1, Edinburgh, William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh, 1845

shop adj.

Used of certain plants as comfrey, eyebright, lungwort, speedwell and valerian; common, officinal.

Images Map Google Earth Studio Cover top & centre SCRAN, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland bottom 2 SCRAN and British Geological Survey / NERC 5,31 British Newspaper Archives 10 Capital Collections, Kevin Mclean 14,27 National Library of Scotland 22 the Artist 25 SCRAN, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland For more information relating to mainly in sinuousities go to Amanda’s website www.passingplace.com Enormous and heartfelt thanks to Dr Greg Kenicer of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh.

Sources for overleaf Hugh Baird, Report on the Proposed Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal, 1813 Francis H Groome, Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland, Thomas C Jack, London, 1882 James E. Handley, The Navvy in Scotland, University of Cork Press, 1970 Jean Lindsay, The Canals of Scotland, David & Charles, London, 1968 Alison Massey, The Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal, Falkirk Museums, 1983 E.A. Pratt, Scottish Canals and Waterways, Selwyn and Blount, London, 1922 The Ministers of the Respective Parishes…. New Statistical Account, Vol. 1, Edinburgh, William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh, 1845 Newspapers: The Caledonia Mercury The Scotsman Design: Typefaces: Printing:

Benjamin Fallon / Romulus Studio Miller & Acumin McAllister Litho Glasgow Ltd.

ISBN 978-0-9929909-6-1

Published as part of Channels, curated by Emmie McLuskey, Associate Artist Programme, Edinburgh Art Festival 2022. www.edinburghartfestival.com Supported by the Scottish Government's Festivals EXPO Fund, and EventScotland.

1

This Union Canal, the last built of Scotland’s canals, 31½ miles in length and designed and routeplanned by the civil engineer Hugh Baird, was cut between 1817 and 1822. It followed the contours of the land to avoid the need for locks, and came to be known as the mathematical river for how it was conceived and built. This canal was created to meet the requirements of new industry and the expansion and demands of Edinburgh at the time of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of the British Empire, when the city and its surrounds needed cheaper coal, lime for its agriculture, and iron, slate, brick, sand, for its New Town. It would bring these things, people and goods into the city and transport the city’s manure, ‘merchant goods’ and passengers away. It’s hard to imagine the rawness of these first cuts, the mud and displacement ­— as violent and scarring as any new road construction, through farmland, orchards and rich folk’s policies, cutting through and building over to maintain its level course. But even such innovation in its construction couldn’t secure longevity, for it lasted only a scant 20 years beyond the inaugural journeys along its course and then the railway came and

the world moved on and got faster, and cargo and passenger traffic waned. Industries and people would come and go, and through it all this weave of water held its course but changed, silted up, and parts were filled in and forgotten. Port Hamilton and Port Hopetoun constituted the original eastern terminus of the canal. Now, it’s the office buildings around Semple Street that stand and retain these names. Port Hamilton originally was a coal basin and Port Hopetoun next to it was built for luggageboat companies. It barely seems credible when you look at old photographs, how these places used to be. In 1921 they began dismantling the buildings and infilling the canal there and changing the canal’s start to the Lochrin Basin. E.A. Pratt, at that time, commented: ‘If, in 1849, the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway Company had refrained, as they might well have done, from taking over the Union Canal – then obviously in a moribund condition – and had left it to its economic fate, it would doubtless have died a natural death long ago, and the citizens of Edinburgh would then have been relieved of the terminal eyesore of which they are now only getting rid.’

4

The vegetation is thick and lush and verdant and if it’s seemingly workaday, it’s also quite remarkable, if you give it time. If you pause and look closely, you’ll see leaves of different shapes and configurations (ovals, heart-shaped, narrow or feathery, serrated or smooth, leaves that are alternate or opposite or whorled up their stems; some will be hairy, some not). Some plants will be flowering in single buds, others in clusters, umbels or spikes, and their flowers will be pea-like, or in rounds of four, five, six or more petals; and in whites, yellows, pinks, purples, blues. Some flowers will be on the wane already, some nearly blooming and others will be biding their time. They interweave and intermingle, and you might find the spots where bindweed has wrapped itself around the leaves of the yellow flag irises and the other plants around it.

6

2

Amanda Thomson

The Hailes quarry, near to which the line of the proposed Canal passes, is the most excellent pavement or flagstone quarry known in this country; the demand from it to Edinburgh alone keeps 40 horses and carts on the road going twice a day, equal to at least 60 tons.

(Baird, 1814)

3

10

11

12

13

It runs a total distance of only 25 miles measured in a direct line; and it expends the additional 6½ miles of its actual length mainly in sinuosities, designed to maintain the dead level and to avoid the costs and delays of lockage.

Francis H.Groome Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland 1882

Imagine cutting channels and building embankments around the contours of hills, building the aqueducts and bridges that would last 200 years. Everything cut, dug, hewed, built, shovelled by hand.

Excavations from one place might make an embankment elsewhere, and with that movement, seeds would also be transported along with the dirt and the rubble. What was inadvertently taken and carried along the towpath on the soles of shoes and boots, or by horses’ hooves, dropped by birds, cart-wheels, or as cargo was transferred or dropped elsewhere, and new communities of plants started growing, competing, learning to live together, in close proximity or finding particular niches over these past two hundred years. Over two hundred and forty different plants thrive here, if you’ve the knowledge and a mind to count. Someone tells me that you can still sometimes see barley growing along the banks from when and where the breweries and distilleries used to be, but Greg tells me that what I’m seeing is wall barley, the wild cousin of the grains that make our beer and whisky. It’s a wild grass, but it still looks out of place, like an escapee, amongst the other grasses, sow thistles, hoary mustard and herb Robert that grow along a seam between the pavement and hoardings that hide the building site beyond.

I’m walking this canal not for its history, but for its nature. There’s a pair of mute swans with six cygnets and moorhens on the water, herring and black headed gulls above, jackdaws and crows that seem to congregate at a particular point a little further along. I walk from Lochrin Basin to Wester Hailes, and later, I’ll learn the names of the plant habitats that the canal passes through, that sit sometimes side by side. open mosaic aquatic and open water hedgerow improved grassland woodland

15

‘The word navvy is an abbreviation of navigator, a name somewhat lightly bestowed on the labourers who ‘cut the navigation’, or, in other words, dug three thousand miles of canals in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century.’ (Handley)

17

‘Throughout the 18th century migrant Irish and Highland workers came to central Scotland in search of employment in the newly industrialised zone….Canal construction was carried out by the crudest methods, and, for the most part, the only tools to be employed were the pick, shovel and wheelbarrow, and the strength of the navvies limbs.

The men simply set to the task of digging a deep, wide trench through the land. They piled the earth into barrows which were then wheeled away and emptied’. (Massey)

18

19

20

And what if we think beyond the labour, the long hours and hard, hard graft, to the untethering from place, history, and family. These were economic migrants, away from their homes, often their families and previous ways of life, and subject to the usual trials, misfortunes and prejudices that migrants often face. This canal was cut through brute force and strength, pick-axes and shovels, inch by inch, foot by foot and its workers would often have to move as the canal moved.

On the same day that the Caledonia Mercury reported L.150,000 has been subscribed to the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal, they published a Curious Statistical Account.

I walk the canal with Greg, a botanist from the Edinburgh Botanics, and he helps me identify more of its plants. We start in spaces alongside the canal that once held a silk mill, a brewery, a rubber-works, a distillery or two, that now lie vacant until their next iteration as mixed-use housing. Greg describes it as an open mosaic habitat. Buddleias grow beside bird’s foot trefoil, docks, coltsfoot, toadflax, pineapple weeds, sow and creeping thistles, hoary mustard, sticky willie, ribwort plantains, and it’s a messy tangle of flowers, and a particular kind of biome ­— a habitat of a type that’s only, really, existed for the past one to two hundred years ­— created by change, urbanisation and what that causes, what that brings. And it will continue to change and reconfigure over time. Coltsfoot leaves, he tells me used to be used instead of tobacco; herb Robert to keep flies from clothes, and he crushes a leaf and it smells pungent, like burnt rubber. He points to a meadowsweet flower, and I compress it and it smells like muscle rub, and there’s a property of it that’s used for such things.

7

23

‘For the Highlander navvying was an initiation into the miseries of the industrial revolution that were the lot of the common man [sic]. His own private world was tumbling about his ears just when the new world was a-making.’ (Handley)

Thingum (n) a person or thing whose name is unknown or forgotten (Jamieson)

5

9

Caledonia Mercury 17 th January, 1814

26

21

14

Along this waterway: blackbirds, tits and chaffinches, wrens and goldfinches and the nasally call of greenfinches. Swallows might skim the surface of the water, and house martins might dart about above. In summer you’ll hear chirrups from the nests of sparrows that are hidden in hawthorn bushes.

Common blues, green veined whites, tortoiseshells and peacock butterflies will flit about, maybe even commas, and orange tips will flutter between the nettles and the cow parsley. Common blue and large red damselflies might dart among the yellow flag irises. The greenery seems to dampen the noise and the roar of the traffic settles to a hush

16

8

Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the bank stops and the water begins.

Looking down, the line between both plant communities, those on the bank and in the water, is hidden by the plants themselves. They’re both tall herb communities ­— water mints and water forget-me-nots and yellow flag irises, meadowsweets, white dead nettles, silverweed, vetches, and sometimes bindweed will interweave itself between both, and flies and bees and damselflies and butterflies won’t pay that much attention to the divisions between them at all.

‘Along the banks of the Union Canal certain edifices have been erected, which strike the traveller with no little astonishment. These are huts erected by Irish labourers, upon some few vacant spots of ground belonging to the canal proprietors, and are pointed out to strangers in the passage-boats as greater curiosities. Each, of course, is more wretched than another, and presents a picture of squalid poverty which is new to the people on this side of the channel. One of them, with the exception, perhaps, of a few sticks, is composed entirely of rotten straw; its dimensions would not suffice for a pig-style, and its form is that of a bee-hive, only it is more conical. The smoke, which does not escape at the door, penetrates through every part of the structure, which thus presents at all times the appearance of a hay-rack on fire. A Hottentot kraal; in comparison with it, is a palace. In the midst of such misery, the children appear healthful and frolicsome, and the men and women contented and happy!’

The Scotsman December 7 th, 1822

There are other places where the vegetation is thicker. Nettles, cow parsley, common hogweed, and tough grasses such as cocksfoot, and fescues all grow together in a thick, tall tangle, so pressed up against each other and the breeze makes them look like they’re all jostling for space. Greg describes them as thuggish plants, competitive, able to stand their ground.

He tells me that it makes sense that these are here, and it’s what you’d expect in these kinds of places. These are plants that respond to atmospheric nitrogen, including that which our cars belch out, and they’re thriving.

There’s a hedgerow that’s full of hawthorns and elder, and it looks old, and we wonder if it in any way pre-dates the canal. Delicate tiny cream petals occasionally catch and are lifted on the breeze, and there’s a smattering of them on the ground and on the surface of the canal. There are brambles and guelder roses too, green alkanet and dandelions that are mainly in full bright yellow flower, but some have already gone to clock.

Amongst this all we come across another plant I hadn’t noticed here before called bittersweet, its bright purple and yellow flowers just coming to their end. Greg tells me its Latin name means sweet-bitter, because of its aftertaste, and it’s a member of the nightshade family, though not the most toxic of them, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

24

29

30

'It gives us great pleasure to hear, that the Magistracy of Edinburgh agreed, on Wednesday last, to support the Bill for the Union Canal. It is also reported that the Ministers of the Crown are favourably disposed towards this undertaking; and, indeed, it would be extremely odd if, at a time when they are disposing of the money raised by taxation, with the view of forcing employment for the poor, they or any others possessed of influence which, whether profitable or otherwise to the subscribers, will certainly in the meantime yield the means of subsistence to many labourers, and in the end forward the agricultural and commercial interests of the country.’ Solar Spots - since the commencement of the present year, these have been fewer in number, less in magnitude and less subjected to sudden changes in their form and position, than they were during the summer, autumn, and winter of last year. There are at present only three visible; two of them are very small and are situate near the upper limb of the sun, nearly in a line parallel with the horizon; the third is much larger than either of the others, and

This canal, built at a time just when the world was beginning to get faster and faster, and people were getting to here, to there, quicker, and from further away, and for some, whether they wanted to or not. When the canal opened, passenger boats were pulled by horses at 9 miles per hour, with the horses changed every 4 hours so that speed would be maintained, but that was never going to remain fast enough. The railway that opened ran often parallel to its course, and the canal slowly fell into decline, though, in that decline, plants and animals would reclaim spaces: tall aqueous

25

31½ 31

22

28

plants growing where the canal had silted up, a thickening fringe along its edges, pondweed skimming its surface. Other plants would sprawl onto and settle on towpaths where before they would have been trampled by horses and foot traffic. Bracken would have been chopped down and used for packing or to bleach linen or as a fertiliser. Still, we’ll walk in the New Town and tread on flagstones from Denny and steps which came from Hailes Quarry, brought in on the canal’s scows, and see how the canal’s reach is still with us in the fabric of the town.

At Port Hamilton and Port Hopetoun, anonymous, non-place, glass-fronted office buildings stand and the material they’re built of could have come from anywhere, and the offices themselves, like some of the new build houses and a school that line a part of the canal could be anywhere too. Where Port Hamilton used to be there’s still the curved wall of an old brick building and a memorial line on the ground that tells us about what was there before, with, at its western end a plaque that tells us that the wave of translation was discovered on the Union Canal, and at the other end a plaque speaking of a mathematical river, but you have to find the spaces between the office blocks and peer beyond to really see that you’re in this particular city again.

27

Handley describes at length the processes of construction, the manual labour needed, and a labour and knowledge base which, once finished with this, had the skill-sets to go on to build Scotland and the UK’s 19th century industrial infrastructure. He describes how once the depth of the canal was dug, a puddleditch and puddle-gutter had to go down. How just the right kind of earth needed to be found, carried in wheelbarrows to where it was going to be used, and chopped down and down with a spade and mixed with water until it became a loose, slightly liquid clay, that would line and seal the canal. They’d spread it in layers, gauging the gradient and altitude of the banks, and they’d walk over it again and again, trampling and compressing it with their boots. ‘When a man could put his weight on it without sinking, it was ready to receive another course of nine or ten inches and so on until the depth made for it had been filled.’

is situate in the equilateral region, but has passed the sun’s centre Upon the representation of the Highland proprietors of land now in London, Government are to grant a considerable supply of oats to such of them as choose to guarantee the price. The Duke of Atholl has greatly exerted himself in their praiseworthy object, and he has been zealously seconded by Lord Macdonald; Mr Grant, M.P. for Inverness-shire; Colonel Macdonald of Lynedale and others. Several proprietors of Highland estates have met the distresses of their tenants by lowering their rents, and supplying them with meal on credit, particularly the Duke of Gordon; Colonel Grant of Grant, M.P., and Lord Reay, who pledged his credit to Government for 1800 bolls of oatmeal for his tenants. The Marquis of Stafford has sent 3400 bolls of meal and 500 bolls of potatoes for seed, to the tenantry on the Sutherland estate, at an expense of nearly L.7000., besides purchasing 5000 cattle from the smaller tenants.

The Scotsman May 10th, 1817

‘The opening of the Union Canal in 1822 led to an early change in the character of the neighbourhood in which its eastern terminus, then “near Edinburgh” was situated….

As Edinburgh increased in population this once rural suburb, having no more than a few scattered houses surrounded by green fields, was completely absorbed within the limits of the city, and the first or last section of the canal, with its two basins, Port Hopetoun and Port Hamilton, became the centre of a congested district forming one of the most thickly populated areas within the city boundaries.’ (Pratt)

Caledonian Mercury May 7 th, 1846

So what’s this last half? What’s the half-life of innovation, the half-life of change? The Union Canal only lasted 20 years before the railway superseded it, but who was to know that outcome when it was conceived, or even, when it was finished. Some of us still remember the decimal half pence, a tiny copper coin half the thickness of a penny; fewer people still the ha’pennies that were part of the previous currency, when it was pounds, shillings and pence. The Union Canal started to be cut the year after Frederick Douglass was born, but by the time he came to Edinburgh, in 1846 negotiations were underway to dispose of its assets and the canal would eventually be sold to the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway Company. Staying in Gilmore Place, he’d have been next door to the canal’s activities, perhaps walking past Mr Gilmore’s Rope Works to Lochrin Basin and seeing what trade remained.

Still, though the world would change beyond recognition from when Baird proposed its route, the canal itself would endure, see the city sprawl west along its banks, and witness industries coming and going too. All the while its plants were making and remaking communities that will continue to transform in these next 200 years in all kinds of unknown ways, responding to the changes we foist on place and atmosphere, reclaiming spaces at every opportunity and finding their way and their place.