Bring along your apples and celebrate the Neighbouring Orchard! We’ll press apples to make juice, share growing tips and enjoy a tasting session.

This is an event for Neighbouring Orchard growers and the wider, apple loving community. Bring along your spare apples and a bottle, so that we can share in our bounty! With the dry weather, it’s been a tricky growing season for many. But whether we end up with a thimbleful of juice or a gallon, it’s important to celebrate together our harvest!

Recent – Walking Wassail, January 2026

This year, community song leader Jane Lewis has been working with local growers to co-create a new wassailing song for the Neighbouring Orchard. On Saturday 24^th January we held our first ‘walking wassail’, visiting some of the apple trees growing in Portobello and singing our new song to them.

Wassailing is an ancient pagan tradition that has been practiced for centuries. It is carried out in the winter months when the trees are bare. It is an occasion of singing, drinking and merriment, where bad spirits are warded off from the orchard and good health for the apple trees is bestowed.

Read the full song sheet here or listen below to the song:

Walking Wassail 2026 (photography: Jon Davey)

Background

The Neighbouring Orchard project first began in 2021 offering young apple trees to households across Portobello, Musselburgh and Craigmillar, providing the possibility of apple harvests in years to come. With this project starting at a time of physical distance from each other, during the pandemic, we looked to plant trees as a way to forge links with people in neighbouring streets and suburbs. This individually planted, socially distant orchard is rooted in community and as the trees grow, bud, blossom and fruit we look forward to a time when we can enjoy the harvests.

The trees are planted in front gardens or shared gardens, ensuring that they are visible to the wider community, acting as markers for people on daily walks, seen from bus windows and from other household’s windows.

The apple varieties offered each have a historic link to the area, having previously been grown in local orchards in the 19th century. Most apple trees need to have different varieties of apple trees nearby in order to be pollinated. The Neighbouring Orchard trees forms a network across individual gardens, linked together by bees and other pollinators who will fly between them.

In 2024 the project was extended to involve the planting of another 50 trees within areas of Craigentinny, Lochend and Restalrig. In total 200 trees have now been planted across the dispersed orchard. We currently don’t have plans to provide any more trees for planting, however we continue to host events and publish maps celebrating the network of growers who form The Neighbouring Orchard.

The Neighbouring Orchard publication by Annie Lord. Published by Art Walk Press 2022

Neighbouring Orchard Zine 2025 marking the first five years of the orchard (designed by Annie Lord & Maddie Lennon)

During 2023 a series of Walking Maps were started to be produced, which we plan to add to over time. Designed by artist David Lemm, with illustrations and text by Annie Lord, they detail locations of a number of the planted trees encouraging walking between. Copies of the maps are available in local libraries, or if you wish to receive a copy posted to you please email info@artwalkporty.co.uk

Neighbouring Orchard Maps (Portobello & Craigmillar) 2023 (designed by Annie Lord & David Lemm)

Drawing workshop with Annie Lord at Bellfield Garden 2021

Recent Press

Pellicle Mag:
‘Close to the Tree – Pochle, Edinburgh’s Communal Apple Spirit’ including Annie Lord & The Neighbouring Orchard, January 2026
Read here

The Herald:
‘Edinburgh project to turn neighbourhood into orchard‘ 1 Dec 2023
Read here

Edinburgh Evening News:
‘Apple tree growers wanted for Edinburgh’s community orchard with a difference‘ 30 Nov 2023
Read here

The Neighbouring Orchard by Annie Lord:
Article: The Neighbourly Orchard, Linseed Journal, Volume 1: The Apple, Nov 2022
Review: Caught By The River, by William Arnold, Read here
Interview: BBC Radio Scotland, with Nicola Meighan, Sept 2022

The Sunday Times:
‘Neighbours’ orchard rooted in lockdown isolation blossoms in Edinburgh gardens’
Jean West, July 26, 2020
Read here

Project Diary

2026
New Walking Map Launch Events (Craigentinny & Musselburgh) – July 2026
Walking Wassail Project – co-created by our community of trees, growers and friends, arr. Jane Lewis – January 2026

2025
Neighbouring Orchard Zine publication celebrating five years – July 2025
Community Harvest and Apple Pressing Feast – September 2025

2024
newLEAVES Network event & walk, Portobello – curated by Dee Heddon and Chris Freemantle – June 2024
Apple Tree Collection Day at Craigentinny Community Garden – March 2024
A further 40 apple trees were provided to residents, community groups and schools based within Craigentinny, Lochend and Restalrig.

2023
Walking Map Launch Walks with Annie Lord – September 2023
Walk 1: Portobello – Cultivating Connections to consider the impact of community growing in Portobello and its connection to a wider ecosystem: from the earthworms that mulch the soil to the moths that take shelter in the trees’ leaves.
Walk 2: Bingham & Craigmillar – Pollinating Populations to consider the role of pollinators: solitary bees, wasps and moths, paying close attention to new planting and the role of weeds.

2022
Book Launch – The Neighbouring Orchard by Annie Lord in conversation with Christina Riley, The Nature Library
Thu 1 September 2022, Portobello Bookshop

Tree Walk with Annie Lord
Sun 4 September 2022, Portobello

The Apple Feast, Annie Lord, with wild chef/forager, Judith Lamb
Sun 11 September 2022, Portobello

Apple Tree Collection Day at Craigentinny & Telferton Allotments
March 2022

2021
Pruning Workshop with John Hancox at Portobello Community Orchard
November 2021

Charcoal Making Workshop with Annie Lord at Eastfield shared growing space September 2021

Drawing Workshop with Annie Lord at Bellfield Community Garden
September 2021

‘Planted’ group show exhibition at Art Walk Porty Project Room (Portobello High Street) with wrapped apples containing stories collected from Annie in conversation with many of the growers –  written by Annie Lord -July/Aug 2021

Annie Lord Artist Talk with Urban Tree Festival – May 2021
Apple Drawing Classes (by Annie Lord) held via Zoom – April 2021

Apple Tree Collection days and deliveries – Jan-March 202

2020
Audio story written and performed by Annie Lord, as part of exhibition at Figgate Lane Community Garden (Art Walk Porty ‘All At Sea’ programme) – October 2020

Annie Lord is an artist, writer and facilitator. Her work explores how we interact with the physical world – transforming plants, animals and minerals into objects of artistic, scientific and domestic value. In 2024-25 she was the Connecting Threads Artist in Residence in Berwick-upon-Tweed, creating work to honour the 400th anniversary of Berwick Bridge. 

The Neighbouring Orchard, a major ongoing artwork by Annie commissioned by Art Walk Projects, has seen a community of 200 apple trees planted out across Edinburgh’s coastal suburbs. The orchard marked its fifth anniversary in 2025. 

As a writer, Annie has written a book about The Neighbouring Orchard (published in 2022 by Art Walk Press) and completed her Masters in Creative Non-Fiction at Manchester Writing School. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize for underrepresented voices in nature writing and is currently developing her award-nominated manuscript, Morphoses. 

annielord.co.uk 

If you are a grower as part of our project you are welcome to join our Facebook Group to stay in touch with many of the other growers sharing images and raising any queries about your tree
@Neighbouring Orchard

If you have any questions about the project please email us at appletrees@artwalkporty.co.uk 

Over the last five years, The Neighbouring Orchard commissioned by Art Walk Projects, has received funding from Creative Scotland, National Lottery Community Fund, Paths for All, Musselburgh Common Good Fund and The Mushroom Trust.

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Their Warning Lights mural, installed for the 2025 Art Walk Porty Festival, takes the beacon symbol as an indicator of warning as well as celebration, whilst designating the Shore Hunt growing space; evoking a space to gather, a space for creativity, hope and celebration, but also of criticality and caution.

The planting of oyster leaf plants (mertensia martima) builds on local and global urgency around marine health, of the value nature based solutions bring to stabilizing our shores, and to the role oyster bed restoration has for coastal protection and boosting biodiversity.

The Shore Hunt space provides a space to gather and to make connections shore to shore. In coming months the space will serve as a growing lab hosting a series of coastal ecology talks, workshops and creative interventions.

Visitors are very welcome to add their own native coastal plants to this developing shore space, cultivating this piece of urban scrubland.

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Fallow Land centres around four artist residencies (Oct 24 to May 25) creating a series of interdisciplinary place-centred projects across working and post-agricultural lands involving Portobello, Craigentinny and Jedburgh culminating in an exhibition at Mote102 Leith Edinburgh (9-17 May 2025) and new journal publication: Fallow Land produced by Rosy Naylor and Tom Jeffreys.

Over a period of six months, each artist has explored a number of interpretations of fallow: from soil health and soil conductivity to community and marine farming initiatives, from fallow processes like tilling to rested land and lands left behind untended due to forced exile.

The project is curated by Rosy Naylor, with scientific support for the ‘Residue’ residency (artist Hanna Paniutsich), from Professor Larissa Naylor, geomorphologist from University of Glasgow who has a specific knowledge experience relating to Seafield and the legacy of waste for the coastal zone. Across the project we have also been working with the two MSc Earth Futures student placements, Emma West and Liqin Peng creating an ‘Inquiry’ series, available to see via our Instagram feed.

About the artist projects

Fallow Land, Fallow Communities James Wyness

As part of his Fallow Land, Fallow Communities residency James Wyness has spent slow time over the last six months observing, researching and documenting patterns of land use in two fallow fields situated within the hinterland of Jedburgh. These arable fields have been set aside from food production for soil regeneration. Through collected sound, performative video and text, his installation Set Aside at Mote102 (May 2025) explores ideas of ruralism and rights of land ownership, considering access and our wider relationships to agricultural land, involving:

Audio: environmental multi-channel sound recorded at Hunt Knowes, a stubble field set aside as part of a winter stubble scheme to encourage birds, later ploughed and sown with spring barley.

Video: a series of performative movements carried out and filmed at Western Muir, a field set aside for two year short term grass. The short moving image clips and loops develop The Landowner project, a series in which Wyness plays the part of a Borders landowner carrying out specific actions in the environment.

Text: gerunds (‘-ing’ words) relating to the assumed activities of a Borders landowner; agricultural terms; and planting map of fields around Hunthill above Jedburgh.

Simultaneously during his residency, Wyness has initiated a community growing food initiative around the town of Jedburgh, Get Jed Fed, exploring the complexity of relationships between ownership and custodianship of public green space and between food growing in both town and county.

James Wyness is a multi-media artist based in Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. He works primarily with sound and lens-based media, producing a range of work from documentary, archival and socially engaged processes to more experimental investigations. His current research converges on a long-term examination of social and environmental aspects of Jedburgh, the river and its basin. Past work has included the sonification of climate change data and the sonic documentation of Seville’s Holy Week Processions.

Shore Hunt Rudy Kanhye and Lauren La Rose

Their residency ‘Shore Hunt‘ considers the shore as fallow land, functioning as testing grounds for alternative realities, economies and borders. A shore is a space where margins and borders expand, where diasporic, migratory and disabled bodies can change the process of representation itself.

As part of Fallow Land, they create a community ‘shore’ cultivating ‘native’ oyster leaf plants (mertensia maritima) situated on Portobello Promenade, an installation Récif d’huîtres (oyster reef) containing 50 handmade porcelain oyster shells made in collaboration with ceramist Anna Samson (Hoya Ceramic) forming their installation at Mote102 (May 2025), followed by further development of the Shore Hunt growing space and mural, planned as part of the Art Walk Porty Festival (September 2025). These interventions build on intersectional research between critical race, disability and decolonial studies, and site-specific research in Mauritius and Scotland, highlighting the role of women across empires – connecting stories from shore to shore.

The work also takes inspiration from a group of fisherwomen of coastal Maharashtra (Western India), who farm oysters from bamboo structures behind their creek, together with the current reintroduction of oyster beds into the Forth (once the largest oyster farming site across Europe).

Rudy Kanhye and Lauren La Rose are mixed and disabled visual artists, collaborators, partners and carers. Their transdisciplinary practice explores the untold histories of indentured immigration, the fallibility of memory, and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. Through their continuous engagement with vanishing or vanquished historical memory and archives, they investigate the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Exploring memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, empathy and solidarity, their work combines the past, present and future with poetry, experimenting with the timelessness of certain symbols, intercultural gestures, globalisation and technologies.

Residue Hanna Paniutsich

Hanna during her residency Residue has explored the area of Craigentinny, a land once a moorland, an irrigated meadow and a common sewer system. The irrigation system concentrated around the production of grass for animal feed and was connected to the production of milk, where once the Fillyside Dairy was located. Around the time of the Second World War it was also a military camp, later demolished to make way for a golf course that currently occupies this area of land near to Edinburgh’s north eastern coast at Seafield.

Such a history of the land prompted Hanna to consider soil health and how contamination and fertility are connected. Measuring the electrical conductivity of soil – along with humidity and temperature data – is one of the vital parameters offering insights into soil health.

Her installation at Mote102 (May 2025) includes: Your Body and the Ground which measures the voltage potential difference between our bodies and the ground, using a copper plate connected to a patch of soil outside the gallery. This artwork explores the grounding properties of earth and the possibility of electricity to be discharged into the soil, something also explored in ‘electroculture’ gardening, where people use metal “antennae” and wires to draw ambient electricity into the soil for use as plant fertiliser.

Hanna Paniutsich is a multimedia artist and researcher based in Glasgow (b. Minsk, Belarus) whose practice is heavily informed by scientific research within the fields of ecology, chemistry, biology and emergent technologies. She navigates different bio materials, satellite imagery, data and coding languages to form a range of multimedia installations, moving image and written works. Recent projects have focussed on subjects of radioactivity, in particular the 30km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, exploring radiation, pollution and contaminated ground.

Homelands left behind Henna Asikainen

Within her residency Henna met with a group of Syrian older women with farming backgrounds who had arrived in Scotland as refugees following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. For those who had been forcibly displaced, the concept of fallow land carried profound resonances. Their longing was woven into stories of home, livestock, orchards and olive trees destroyed, and their own lands, now far away from the soil they once tilled. Fallow land suggests an eventual return, a season of restoration. But what if return is denied? Homeland, not abandoned by choice, but rendered untended by forced exile – existing in a state of suspended potential in the minds of those displaced. Like a fallow field, not barren but waiting – could a homeland held in memory still hold the possibility of renewal? And if leaving land fallow is an act of restoration, then what is being restored—the land itself, or the people who still carry it within them?

Henna’s installation at Mote102 (May 2025) involves two works:
Roots and Soil – An uprooted young sycamore tree, displaced by commercial forest clearing. Its exposed roots carry traces of the soil it once held, embodying both loss and resilience. ‘Roots and Soil’ reflects on the fragile interdependence between land and life, inviting contemplation on what it means to be uprooted—both for the tree and for those whose lives are similarly disrupted by forces beyond their control.

We Lived from Our Cherry Orchards but They Are All Cut Down Now – A felled cherry tree stands as a silent witness to loss and resilience. Thin strips of red birch bark, inscribed with words from women who have experienced forced displacement, are hung from its branches—like echoes of voices… These inscriptions speak of orchards destroyed, land seized and abandoned, and livelihoods lost. Cherry, walnut, and pistachio trees once flourished, sustaining communities now uprooted. Yet amidst the loss and ravaged landscape there is space for hope and renewal—the land, though scarred, waits patiently…

Henna Asikainen is a multidisciplinary, socially engaged artist, whose work questions human relationships with nature, and the complex social and ecological issues that emerge. Many of Asikainen’s recent projects have been built around communal experiences within different landscapes and have examined issues including migration, climate justice and unequal access to nature. Her work consistently advocates for a philosophy of friendship and radical hospitality.

Associated writings

Exhibition Review by Maria Howard @Corridor 8

Journal Publication: Fallow Land, priced £5

Read more about the four residencies together with articles from curator Rosy Naylor, writer Tom Jeffreys, coastal specialist Larissa Naylor and researcher Anna-Katharina Laboissière in our latest journal publication:
Issue 3: Fallow Land.

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Gardeners were invited to create pollinator-rich growing schemes inspired by ideas of seaside retro, in keeping with our 2025 ShowGround themed Art Walk Porty festival. The project aimed to increase biodiversity and connect neighbours together whilst celebrating nature, wildlife and colour.

All those participating were included in the Art Walk Porty Festival Map and had a ‘Flowering Porty’ sign located in their growing space, with all spaces being visible from the street.

Three small prizes were awarded for the Best Seaside Retro Garden based on a public vote.

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For Art Walk Porty, McMullan is collaborating with Restalrig-based community group, The Ripple Project, looking at methods of rainwater collection and community growing to create a scented water-collection sculpture. Made from discarded plastic and organic material, this work is informed by McMullan’s interest in interactions between humans and insects, as well as the unique scent and growth patterns of tomato plants.

Top image: Installation at mote102 (Art Walk Extended, September 2023)
Photo: Sally Jubb Photography

Images from Water Collection Device Workshop at Craigentinny Community Garden (Photos: Ellie J McMaster)

Tonya McMullan situates her work amidst communities using long-term engagement to make context-specific, process-based, participatory and performative installations that foreground ecological concerns. McMullan has immersed herself in the world of insects for several years: ongoing projects with beekeeping, urban agriculture and pollinators have developed into explorations of our sensory and extra-sensory connections.

Past projects include Crude Floral (2022), a series of scent explorations with Art Walk Projects; There is something in the æther (2021), a scent and hand sanitiser created for TULCA festival in Galway to encourage people to recollect smell memories and consider relationships with the environment past present and future; and The Lure of Tomorrow’s Harvests (2020), an installation commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery comprising an archive of Edinburgh honey collected during lockdown.

Images from Water Collection Device Workshop with The Ripple Project (August 2023).

Bottom image: Guided tour to Seafield Water Treatment Plant (September 2023).
Photos: Tonya McMullan and Rosy Naylor

LIST OF WORKS

July-August 2023 Workshops with The Ripple Project, Craigentinny
September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, Art Walk Hub Portobello
VESSEL Group Exhibition, mote102 Ferry Rd Leith
Rainwater Collection Workshop, Craigentinny Community Garden
Seafield Water Treatment Plant Drawing Tour
Conversing with Tomatoes Event with wild foods forager Judith Lamb

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Felicity Bristow and Susie Wilson first began their residency in 2019 working the land from their garden shed at Plot 55b at Craigentinny Telferton Allotments. However due to the lockdown in March 2020 the artists continued to work together, though apart, developing a growing project sending seed to each other and other participants to grow, later harvest, and collect seed from. Out of this their ‘Growing in Isolation’ project developed in 2020 involving a postal exchange. Touching the earth, planting the seeds and tending the growing plants was something positive and hopeful for many people in the growing community, in such an uncertain and anxious time. The seeds became the focus to their work and made them realise the importance of ‘the seed’ to this commission with them in 2019 establishing ‘The Seed Library’.

The delight and quiet of spending time growing something and protecting it as it matures was felt to be very rewarding by many people growing in isolation. The Seed Library received generous donations of seeds from plot holders at C&T allotments, as well as from UK-wide network of other growers which they have continued to share throughout their project.

The Plot55b residency project culminated in 2021 with the publishing of an artist bookwork bringing together the various elements the artists had encountered and experienced through the period of working engaging with the allotments. It is record of a very fragile time globally whilst focussing on the detail of the growing of a seed, and what that process brought to so many as this uncertain and difficult time.

PRESS

ARTIST INTERVIEW with ART NORTH ‘Art & Food’ special issue read here
ARTIST INTERIVEW with freelance writer & reviewer, Genevieve Fay read here

LIST OF WORKS & EVENTS

2020
‘Wassailing’ at Plot 55b, Craigentinny Telferton Allotments
8 March 2020 – A celebration of planting two new apple trees on Plot 55b. With apple themed verse, song and toast to the new trees followed by a walk to wake the trees at Craigentinny & Telferton Allotments for a bountiful growing season in 2020.

2021
Planted exhibition Art Walk Porty Hub – September 2020
Alongside Seed Walk, Meadows Yard Nature Reserve
& Book Launch Plot 55B Art Walk Porty Hub
Growing in Isolation window installation Portobello Library – August 2020

2022
Seed Walks, Musselburgh Lagoons – October 2022

Felicity Bristow
Felicity’s site-specific work is an exploration of line, narrative, material and the pervading spirit of place or ‘genius loci’. Felicity is fascinated with words, with making, researching and exploring the physical structure of books and buildings site specifically.

Felicity studied architecture at Edinburgh College of Art (1993 – 99) and qualified as an architect, practising in Edinburgh until 2008 while also teaching part time at ECA (2003 – 07). In Summer 2016 she completed a MA in Contemporary Art Practice, with Merit. She now lives and works as an artist in the Scottish Borders developing her own research-based practice in her WASP’s studio (Selkirk) and works part time for the Creative Arts Business Network (CABN) in Selkirk and North Light Arts in Dunbar.

felicitybristow.com

Susie Wilson
Susie’s work examines the relationship between the hidden and the seen both metaphorically and physically. Exploring the book form enables her to combine print, paint and collage in a more sculptural way. The intimacy of holding the book, each page hiding then revealing the next, creates an atmosphere that is deeply personal. She is interested in this sense of revelation. Layers of translucent paper, stitched and cut into, obscure the forms and images creating a tension between the various areas reflecting the delicacy, fragility and subtlety of the subject.

Susie Wilson graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1992 with a BA (Hons) Degree and PostGrad. in Drawing and Printmaking. She won two scholarships to Athens School of Fine Art (1990) and to Seville School of Fine Art (1992) to study printmaking. In 2001 she gained a place on the CATS course (Creative and Technical Skills Programme) run by the Print Studio at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Her work has been shown in many group exhibitions in Scotland, most recently at WASPS, Patriothall, Edinburgh (2012), MacNaughtans Bookshop, Edinburgh (2011), Society of Scottish Artists (2012),Visual Arts Scotland (2012), Andrew Grant Gallery (Edinburgh College of Art, 2011), Dundee Contemporary Arts (2002) and Meffan Gallery (2002). Her books and prints have also been exhibited abroad in India (2010) and the USA (2011). Her work is in the collection of the City Art Centre, Edinburgh Fine Art Library and Edinburgh College of Art. She has taught Printmaking and Artist Books at Edinburgh College of Art for ten years and also teaches in adult education and schools in and around Edinburgh. Recently awarded Sally Schofield Memorial Prize, (Visual Arts Scotland, 2015) and Nancy Graham Memorial Book Prize (VAS, 2014)

susiewilson.org

Images by: Elle McMaster

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