I’m working on a new bark scarf for the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. This is for their forthcoming exhibition, Plants from the Woods & Forests of Chile, that will run between 10th October 2015 and 6th March 2016. See Listing.

I spent a day last summer in the garden photographing the monkey puzzles and people watching. Bliss really. A bride came and was photographed there and almost every small child (and some older ones) could not resist touching the leaves.

The Monkey Puzzle is the national tree of Chile and is sacred to the Mapuche peoples of south-central Chile and south-western Argentina. The tree provides them with both spiritual succour and sustenance as it crops significant quantities of edible seeds. It was classified as endangered in 2013, primarily due to logging and the extensive deforestation of its natural habitat.

It was first named as Pinus araucana in 1782 by Juan Ignacio Molina, the Chilean Jesuit priest and polymath, in his book Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chilii but it was not until the 1850s that its common English name came into use.

It is a relatively slow growing but long-lived tree, widely planted in Western Europe as an ornamental specimen and distinctive for its large and sharp leaves.

This particular specimen I have used for the scarf was grown from seed taken from a tree growing in Melville Castle, Eskbank in 1980.