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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Mark Fisher

Windblown review – haunting elegy for a felled 200-year-old natural wonder

Tree hugging … Karine Polwart performs Windblown at Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh.
Tree hugging … Karine Polwart performs Windblown at Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/the Guardian

If you thought there could not be a more Edinburgh-centric show than James Graham’s Make It Happen, with its appearances from Adam Smith and figures from the city’s once great banks, well think again. In Windblown, Karine Polwart commemorates an Edinburgh institution of similar longevity. And she does it exquisitely.

Her focus is the sabal palm that stood in the Royal Botanic Garden for more than 200 years and, even before that, grew in the original gardens at the top of Leith Walk. It outgrew the original glass house within decades and towered over generations of visitors until, in 2021, this oldest living specimen in the collection had to be chopped down.

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