Folklore and Songs of Plants with Margaret Bennett

Join us for an evening with renowned folklorist and folk singer Professor Margaret Bennett as she shares Scotland’s rich tradition of plants, their uses, lore, and songs. Her talk will be interspersed with folk singing accompanied by students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, slides and archival footage from the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive.

About the Speaker

Originally from Skye, Prof. Bennett studied folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and then Ethnology (PhD) at Edinburgh University. From 1984 to 1996 she was a lecturer and researcher at the School of Scottish Studies (Edinburgh), and later contributed to the development of the BA (Hons) in Cultural Studies at UHI Orkney. She is currently a lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Author of many books and articles, her publications on the study of plants include “Plant Lore in Gaelic Scotland” in R. Pankhurst, Flora of the Outer Hebrides, British Museum of Natural History, (1991), “The Folklore of Plants in Scotland”, in Plants and People: Economic Botany in Northern Europe, 800-1800, ed J.H. Dickson and R.R. Mill, Edinburgh (1994), as well as contributions to the Dictionary of the Folklore of Plants in Britain and Ireland, ed. Roy Vickery. London: British Museum of Natural History (1996).

We are pleased to be hosting Margaret and her students as part of Celtic Connections Festival 2025.

Host or Publisher The National Library of Scotland at Kelvin Hall