Autumn Enchantment. Scotland's First, Highest, and Best Looking Skyscraper.

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It is that time of year again on the artist's colour wheel. Autumn is my second favourite season after Spring. The parklands of Glasgow are my muse. My ever sparkling 'girl next door' and the true love for all of my life since I could see out the pram.
Bellahouston Park here and the recently introduced wild flower borders. Not only is it a pretty foreground it will hopefully help the insects. East and west coast has added these strips in parks, motorway verges and on roundabouts over the last few years.

A Red Admiral butterfly- a late summer/autumn specialist. Even seen them still flying in snow covered landscapes. Hardy creatures.

It was a lucky weekend as far as the autumn leaves were concerned- perfect depth of colours yet a few days later most would blow to the ground. Very much a lottery every year as to how long they stay on the tree and how deep the colour gets. If its quiet, frosty and still they can last for weeks but it's been mild and stormy recently, a lot of snapped off branches lying on the ground.

Tough for fragile things like butterflies. A Speckled Wood here- a rare find for me- the first I've seen... or certainly not familiar anyway. I had to look it up.

One of my favourite Glasgow parks and views. Bellahouston. At one time they built a tower here for the 1938 Empire Exhibition. 300 foot, 91 metres high, built to a space age futuristic design and already placed on top of a hill so the stunned crowds were sometimes treated to standing high above the cloud level on a still morning balanced on wide flat platforms resembling high diving board stages, one placed above the other. Nothing built in Glasgow since then at height has compared to that spectacular wonder of the age. It was the Shard of it's day. A wide landscaped grand cascade of waterfalls and fountains  poured from its hilltop base to the bottom of the slope with smaller towers underneath hiding pumping stations for the water to flow back uphill. Everything illuminated at night in different colours.
Type in Tait Tower. Glasgow after this post to see it all. This at a time when Glasgow or any of the other UK cities had no residential skyscrapers to speak of that the public could access easily so all the more extraordinary.Why Glasgow? Well, our normal shipping trade connections to New York of course and buildings rising higher and higher there. We wanted a taste of that action in our own city.
 Sadly, it only lasted a year then was taken down again for fear that enemy planes could spot it from a considerable distance. It did have 100 mile views across Scotland from the top platform so an all too easy landmark. By then the Second World War was looming on the horizon and much of Europe could be our enemy. One of the major attractions of its time though, a proud pinnacle to modernism and future trends, and around 12 million people came to this park to see it and the other exhibits, paying a shilling to get in. Just like some teenagers today wish they could go back to the 1960s or other supposedly more exciting eras I wished then I could travel back in time just for one day to climb it. The normal human condition to always cherish the unobtainable faraway over the everyday within reach.

We tend to think of the modern age having all the great wonders available but the various Empire Exhibitions in the UK and Worlds' Fair constructs in America could transform entire cities on an entirely different scale due to the money to labour and material costs then. This city park was one of three we could reach in a day trip from the castle trio location base in Pollokshields, the others being Maxwell and Pollok but when we were told a huge gleaming tower used to stand here, when all we could see was an uninspiring flat concrete foundation base it evoked a powerful longing in us. Did it really exist? Did it ever happen here? Hard for young minds to grasp looking at the spot. The Second World War was still a fresh memory for our respective parents but when they mentioned it, infrequently, to us, pointing out some disused structure in the landscape, it might as well have been Roman relics they were talking about- time wise. No idea of the timeline of history yet at that age. It was all just - 'the past' to us. Distant and remote. No relevance to our own lives so interesting but unimportant. Between 5  to 5000 years ago.... all the same to us. But the idea of this gleaming tower standing on a hilltop above the city did make a vivid impression.
Much like many born after a spectacular event who can't even fathom how it was possible when it was only the ghost of a past era we were learning about and little evidence remaining today... we were slightly skeptical of that magnificent missing structure existing but captivated by it at the same time in our imagination - hence the current widespread disbelief over the moon landings I suppose. Or the deliberate unlearning of the flat earth community as we move towards an uncertain future. Who doesn't love a 'Golden age' looking back.

All Glasgow's many parks were in their infancy then or not even constructed yet and when you look at old photographs most had flimsy, recently planted saplings in them- not the lush forests of mature trees we see around us today. We are so lucky to live in this age. I guarantee people will look back at this current period with great nostalgia. Every age is a golden one to those growing up in it. They just don't fully realise it at the time.

With a over a million toiling souls living here then Glasgow was a dirty, unhealthy, rat infested, overcrowded industrial powerhouse, full of factories, shipyards, tall chimneys belching out soot and grime, with frequently sick residents, shorter life spans, and a dead, lifeless river.  Too polluted to hold a single fish.

Along with half the population we have got rid of all that squalor and mess and the UK in general is a much healthier, greener place. The River Clyde has fish swimming in it again.
However, as Stacey Dooley's recent excellent documentary on the fashion industry showed the problem has just been moved elsewhere-and increased in volume- to India, Indonesia and The Aral Sea. Now they have dead rivers, pollution and lax environmental enforcement laws. Swings and roundabouts.
Maybe no coincidence she came to Glasgow for it. A city transformed within 60 years.  See link below.
 https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/5a1a43b5-cbae-4a42-8271-48f53b63bd07

Another programme I watched recently was Autumnwatch: New England set in the forests of New Hampshire to capture 'the Fall.'
While I enjoyed the change of wildlife, especially the flying squirrels, different birds and moose I must admit I was slightly disappointed in the colour range of the trees over there. Maybe it was the wrong place, wrong time, or a bad year but it was mostly red, gold, still green or brown in the footage they captured. I have seen much better images of autumn colours in USA blog land. This is an honest opinion. So I think we should appreciate and celebrate our own range of colours here more- not as vivid or showy perhaps but with a dedicate overall blend and varied combination of hues to rival anything- anywhere...especially in city parks- with trees collected from all over the world. New Hampshire and the lake they filmed at looked remarkably like Loch Lomond and its islands I noticed.

Autumn line up in pale gold.

Ye ancient forests of the Bear's Den.

Red Poppies. Bellahouston's Walled Garden. October. 2018.

Swans. Forth and Clyde Canal.

Great Western Road in Autumn.

The urban forests within any city. Very bare place without them.

Best colour mix of hues.

Flower border. Walled Garden.

Japanese Maple. House for an Art Lover. Bellahouston Park Gardens.