The Harmony Report - Issue 39 - 28.09.26

This week’s stories all seem to circle around the same idea ... that some of the most meaningful change happens not by creating something entirely new, but by reconnecting things that have become separated ... Habitats, people and place and growers and the food on our plates.

Perhaps harmony is, quite literally, about making the connections stronger.

🌿 NATURE - Fife is joining the landscape back together

There’s something particularly lovely happening along the coastline at St Andrews.

The St Andrews Nature Networks project has just been highly commended in the Nature Positive category of the International Green Gown Awards, after previously winning the UK and Ireland award but the interesting bit isn’t really the award... it’s what sits behind it.

Rather than concentrating conservation efforts on one isolated patch of land, the project brought together local and national land managers across 27 different sites along 16km of Fife coastline, with the aim of restoring habitats and connecting them to one another.

Over 15 months, 408 volunteers -students, university staff and people from the wider community took part in 38 conservation and training sessions. Together they created wetlands, restored a saline lagoon and even introduced Highland cattle to graze coastal braes for conservation.

There’s an increasingly important idea in conservation that protecting little pockets of nature isn't enough if wildlife can't move between them. Healthy landscapes need corridors, connections and room for species to travel and perhaps, as always, there’s a wider lesson in that.

We can all do good things individually but when those good things begin to connect, one garden to another, one landowner to another, one community to another, they start becoming something much more resilient.

🌱 COMMUNITY - A garden planted with hopes for a place

In Paisley, meanwhile, a rather wonderful new artwork has appeared in a community garden.

Called The Garden, it began with a beautifully simple question posed to local young people ... What do you want to see grow and thrive in your community?

More than 50 children, young people and families worked together through community workshops to answer it and their ideas now decorate four log planters permanently installed in Barshaw Park.

Their answers weren't only the things you might expect to grow in a garden ... they wanted more bees and friendship and kindness and poems on bus stops and, rather brilliantly, more common sense.

The project, supported by Creative Scotland and Friends of Barshaw Park, was unveiled earlier this month.

I love the simplicity of it because somewhere along the way we can start thinking of community as more than something that simply exists ... communities need tending in much the same way gardens do.

🥕 FOOD - Scotland is asking how more local food reaches local plates

And finally, something that feels particularly close to home for us here at Fossoway.

On Friday, the Scottish Government published the terms of reference for a new Public Sector Food Procurement Taskforce, created to look at how more food grown, raised, harvested or made in Scotland can find its way into Scotland's public-sector kitchens.

That means thinking about the food served in places such as schools and other public institutions and asking what currently prevents more of it being sourced closer to home.

The taskforce brings together growers and producers with processors, public-sector buyers and procurement specialists. Its job is to identify the barriers and make recommendations about how local and sustainable food procurement could work better.

Of course, a taskforce isn't the same thing as change on the ground, what matters will be what comes from it, but the question itself matters.

One of the strange things about our modern food system is how easily the place where food is grown can become disconnected from the place where it is eaten.

We talk a lot at Fossoway about eating seasonally and buying locally not because everything can, or should, come from within a few miles of home, but because shorter connections between growers and eaters can create value far beyond the contents of a plate.

They keep money circulating locally, they help sustain growers, they reconnect us with seasons and they make food feel a little less anonymous so it feels encouraging to see that same conversation happening at a much bigger table.

A little more harmony

Three very different stories this week yet underneath them is much the same thought. Perhaps stronger systems aren't always built by adding more. Sometimes they're built by reconnecting what is already there.

Nature works through relationships, communities work through relationships and local economies do too. Perhaps that's worth remembering in our own little corners of the world.

We don't necessarily need to do everything, we can start by strengthening the connections around us.

Until next week,

Karen xx