The Evergreen, a unique anthology in 4 volumes from Edinburgh’s Old Town, revisits a 400-year old tradition that sparked the Evergreen anthologies of Allan Ramsay and Patrick Geddes, inspiring a civic and cultural revival within Edinburgh and beyond. After 120 years, it’s back!
The city is ceaselessly working, but who is it working for?
Who is more outstanding in his field than James Kelman? But, in The Evergreen he’s now standing outside his field looking in. Around town, Elizabeth Darling hears the sounds of children at play in the Canongate – from over a hundred years ago. Kirsti Wishart blasts us into the future with an amazing cohort of untraditional superheroes, many of whom suffer from traditional Scottish syndromes! Lucy Ellmann performs another of her daring rescues – this time it’s the baleful, beleaguered shopgirls of Edinburgh who are swept to safety, with morally instructive pictures by Diana Hope.
Petra Reid takes up Lucky Spence’s tale (and cause) where she left it off. Not much has changed for Edinburgh’s filles de joie in three hundred years. Kenny Munro revels in discoveries in old footage of The Honest Toun, while Tom Hubbard and Lou Dear think furiously about a subject close to our hearts: the university, and how it might one day become something useful. Jim Gilchrist revisits a Grassmarket almost unbelievable today, an arcadia of song and gelato.
Peter Burnett goes behind the scenes of our wonderful world of arts festivals and finds something very, very nasty. Joyce Guthrie witnesses a messy death on Lothian Road. Turns out it’s someone nobody knows, a tourist gone astray. David Wheatley rolls up his sleeves and gets to grips with Doric, celebrating our own Robert Fergusson into the bargain. Meanwhile, Robert Davies turns a very baffled lens on those who have found themselves high and dry in Granton, and poets Neil C Young and Eddie Gibbons get their hands grubby.
But The Evergreen gets out in the world, too: Paul Furneaux takes us on an exquisite visual journey from Aberdeen to Tokyo to Edinburgh, by way of a studio in flames. Brian McLaughlin sends us a timely Letter from Barcelona: he’s seen the future of its Old Town and … OMG it’s us! Ali Millar wonders if any of this is worth it. And from the West Port, Ken Crump writes that there’s some mighty pretty country out there.
This publication is supported by Creative Scotland, Saltire Society and Edinburgh World Heritage Trust.
Publication Date: September 2015
175 pages; ISBN: 978-0-9930544-1-9
Click here to purchase The Evergreen: A New Season in the North Volume 2.
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