Nothing that ends in a gift ends in nothing

Today (Saturday June 2nd) we went to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh. We chose to have a low-key weekend, as we are both pretty tired, so the plan was to clean our flat, do a bit of laundry, plan some activities for future weekends, prepare a Primary lesson, and visit the Botanical Gardens. We had a lazy morning and then set off for the Botanical Gardens to be there shortly after they opened at 10 a.m. There was no entrance charge (though "in-app purchases" may be in our future) You can even borrow a motorized chair if you need one, and there would be no charge for that either, though they do suggest that a donation to help pay for chair maintenance would be appreciated.

In short, the Royal Botanical Gardens are a gift to the people of Edinburgh, including visitors. The gift was made 351 years ago, and continues giving and being appreciated today. There was a constant stream of people entering through the gates, many with children in strollers, but once you got into the gardens, the atmosphere was mostly peaceful, mostly quiet, and occasionally even isolated with no one else in sight.  We found a map and quickly decided that this was a place to be explored over several days. Today we would head for the woodland area and rock gardens in one corner.  We memorized our route (later we would realise that we could have picked up a paper copy of the map in the visitor's centre) and set off along the path, turning  right at what we thought was the right place. We weren't quite sure if that was the correct turn or if we should have turned earlier, but we could see another map about 50 yards away so went to check, and suddenly realized that the gardens are much bigger than we had thought, and we had actually turned much too early for the route we had planned to follow. Not that it mattered; we were surrounded by beautiful, quiet woodland and shrubs, and a few of the specimens were even labelled. The area we traversed was wildish - lots of plants, but it was not meticulously groomed. One of us made the observation that they probably had limited staff, and this area had not yet had its turn this season.

Chinese garden bridge

Then we walked around a bend and came to the Chinese garden. All the plants in that section, probably as big as our property on Cedar Ave come from China. There were statues and a little waterfall and a stream traversed by two different but matching red bridges, above a pond.

Then we came to the rock garden area. This was the first time we were not in shade. There were still paths, but they ended in lawn, and it was quite clear that we were invited to walk on the grass, so we did. This area was  clearly and carefully groomed. I would say it was  formal, except that it was carefully informal, with free-form but carefully edged beds. Richard took photographs, so I will not bore you with too much description, only say it was breathtakingly beautiful. There were weathered stone steps going up and down to various levels and the garden included its own waterfall and stream.

Nothing that ends in a gift ...

The next area we came to was a memorial to all of Scotland's organ donors. It was a peaceful place, with a shrine covering a stone covering a book with the names of every person in Scotland who had donated their organs so that their death might give life to someone else. There was a birdbath sort of arrangement nearby, with the bowl full of stones (those who had benefited from organ donation were invited to add a stone) and around the rim of the bowl were engraved the words, "nothing that ends in a gift ends in nothing" in a circle so the word "nothing" was engraved only once.

It is a sweet thought, and it made me think. I hope it gives comfort to those who have lost loved ones, who have found the courage to turn their own loss into life for someone else.  Organ donors tend to be young people, and their deaths tend to be sudden and traumatic for their families. I thought about how the Saviour gave us all a gift, and because of His gift, everyone has something to look forward to, whether or not they fully accept his offering, but without his sacrifice and gift, there would be nothing.

Mossy rocks

Just as we were leaving we looked over the gardens from the gatehouse deck and saw these elephant ears. They are large enough that even an African elephant would be proud to wave them. For a sense of scale look at the person in the white shirt in the top right corner.

We spent a couple of hours in the gardens and explored one corner. We look forward to returning.