Before May Day, the first Green parliamentarian in Britain had a rather natty way of making sure he stood out from the crowd. Plucked from his job as a secondary school teacher to become the sole voice of the Greens in the Scottish parliament, Robin Harper could very easily have found his words drowned out by his 128 colleagues from the more established parties.
But rather than opting for media blitzes, Harper took a more unconventional route to getting noticed. He bought a scarf - a big, long multi-coloured number of the sort favoured by Dr Who.
After the party's dramatic gains in the May 1 elections, though, the scarf is being left in the wardrobe - and not just because the weather has changed. The Greens are in little danger of being lost in the crowd; they have formed a crowd themselves.
From a group of one, the Scottish Greens now have seven people claiming their seats in the Scottish parliament's temporary Edinburgh home.
"There has always been four-party politics in Scotland, but now it has become six," says Harper. "It is going to be an enormous challenge for us. People are expecting a lot, but, despite the coalition's majority, I hope we have enough MSPs elected to really make a difference."
Coalition talks between Labour and the Liberal Democrats are still under way, but it is almost certain they will form an executive within days. When they do, though, they will not have an easy job getting their policies through. A Labour-Lib Dem executive would have a working majority of only two, and Lib Dem backbenchers have shown they are not afraid to rebel. So the executive may need the support of the Greens if it is not to find itself routinely thwarted.
"What I hope we will achieve is a more general greening of the way parliament thinks about things," says Eleanor Scott, the party's leader. "I don't expect we will produce an enormous amount of legislation ourselves, but when the parliament produces legislation we can make sure the environmental factor is written into it."
The Greens are certainly going to bring something different to political life north of the border. Although Scott is the de facto leader of the party, she recoils at the title. "We don't really believe in leaders, but, by law, we have to have one," she says "The party chose me rather than Robin [Harper] so we could have a woman in the role."
If naked political ambition is not for the Greens, then the duplicitous backroom politics that oil so much political life is anathema. Harper says the party has no intention of making any deals with the executive and will offer support or opposition on a case-by-case basis. If deals and quid pro quo are out, this leaves, then, an obvious question: what can the first Green caucus in a British parliament actually achieve?
A flick through their manifesto quickly reveals policies with not a chance of getting on to the statute book: for example, there is little prospect of cannabis farms springing up in Scotland, and, with all the major parties supporting it, it is unlikely that the controversial extension to the M74 motorway will be shelved. There are, though, more realistic prospects.
"I think we have a very good chance of increasing the boundaries of the Cairngorms national park to include large areas of Perthshire that were unjustifiably omitted," says Scott.
A bill to increase energy efficiency within Scotland's homes seems also likely to get through; and the party plans to push hard for a moratorium on genetically modified crop testing. "The Welsh assembly has done this and we want it in Scotland too," says Harper. "Ross Finnie [the rural affairs minister] claims it would be in breach of European legislation. Our legal advice says this is nonsense: it's just a penny-pinching attitude to avoid court costs."
Although the election of seven Green MSPs makes Scotland, on the surface at least, appear the most environmentally aware part of the Britain, the reality is starkly different. Scotland's recycling record is appalling, its protection of wildlife lacking, and its pollution control poor. It is fertile territory for Green change - and the voting system for the Scottish parliament may turn out to have been the catalyst for such change.
Scots have two votes for their parliament: one for a constituency member, one for a regional list. The more constituency seats a party takes, the less chance it has of taking a regional seat. So in areas such as Glasgow, where Labour takes all or nearly all of the constituency seats, there is little point in its supporters voting for it in the list vote. This means voters are prepared to give parties such as the Greens a chance - to the tune of seven seats this time round.
It may not sound like a huge number, but the parliament's committee structure - committees that, unlike their Westminster counterparts, have genuine power in shaping legislation - means a seven-strong team is large enough to allow the Greens to exert serious influence on legislation, and to lead their own debates.
"We have caught up with Europe: the Greens have finally arrived in British politics and people will be expecting things from them," says Peter Lynch, lecturer in politics at Stirling University. "This is a great parliament for allowing backbenchers and small parties to do things, rather than disappear into obscurity. So it will be interesting to see how they perform."
For Harper and his six new parliamentary friends, the next four years will, he admits, be perhaps the most testing the Greens have faced in Scotland. "We have priorities, such as getting a wildlife crimes bill through, and longer-term goals, such as getting the toughest pollution laws in Europe for Scotland, but we will also have to prove we are more than an environmental pressure group," he says.
"We want to give same-sex partners the same rights as heterosexual couples and show the social justice side of Green politics. The Greens believe in environmental protection, certainly, but we believe in many other things too and we have to educate people about what they are - and make a difference."
