“The second ‘Glasgow Requiem’ planting took place in the Necropolis on 11th/12th May 2024, following the December initial planting event, when a group of hardy souls dug in thousands of bulbs on a damp winter afternoon. By contrast, we turned up on a warm Sunday in Spring, to be greeted by the team who were preparing the food (the event was followed by a delicious lunch) and setting up the music. Friends, families and strangers chatted and strolled around the Necropolis, enjoying the May blossoms and the mellow atmosphere, the background rumble of Tennant’s Brewery reminding us of the industrial setting.

Climbing up the steep steps to the top section (apparently once a quarry, in the days before the Necropolis) we could feel the divisive principle of ‘us and them’ even in death, with the flaring mausoleums of rich Glasgow merchants looming over the flat grass area below, where over 8,000 of the city’s poor lie buried in unmarked graves. By August of this year, the common grave will be a flowering meadow.

To start things off, the Siobhan Miller trio set up a reflective mood with their music, including a beautiful version of Burns’s ‘Flow Gently Sweet Afton’, the melody the work of Alexander Hume, a weaver poet buried within this site. Angus then explained how the flower seed would commemorate the labouring men and women whose mortal remains lie beneath us, many of whom had come to the crowded tenements of the Calton from the rural Highlands or Ireland as well as sailors from America and Germany. In other words migrants, like the millions crossing the world today, too many of whom also end up in unmarked graves.

He introduced his partners the indefatigable ‘Friends of the Necropolis’ and the ‘Scouse Flowerhouse’, who had brought seeds and solidarity from Liverpool, another city with a dark industrial history. After the reading of a haiku by poet Gerry Loose (evoking sad memories of his recent bereavement) we set to it. We took off our shoes and meshed our toes in the sandy soil, then ‘broadcast’ the mix of bran and seed with long sweeping arm strokes.

In a lovely act of communal movement, we paced slowly across the burial area, spreading the precious seed to all four corners, before regrouping and doing the same in a transverse direction, accompanied with a delicate improvisation with Innes White on guitar and Charlie Stewart on fiddle. Finally a celebration of water, lost sources here at the Lady Well and a shared bottle drawn from a still-surviving well at St James Cemetery Park in Liverpool led by artist Nina Edge; a simple personal blessing and the pouring of water drawn from the Molendinar burn, to germinate the seed, and begin the process of bringing life and memory forth again in this place of the forgotten dead. ”