Finding things in the grass

I've got into the way of scrutinising the greensward of the Boggy Brae as I walk about. The other day I noticed a patch of green that differed from the rest in the field. when I went for a closer look, it turned out to be a patch of grass of a different species from that surrounding it. I'll investigate further in due course. In the meantime my self-testing guess is one of the soft grasses, Holcus species.

The other evening, in the slanting light, as I was walking up the south-east slope after abandoning the lawn-mower in a boggy bit where it had got stuck beyond my strength (Toad later rescued it and finished the mowing I had started), I noticed a different green in the grass again. closer inspection revealed it to be the leaves of Whorled Caraway (Carum verticillatum) in one of the places I had first found it growing last year.

As you can see from the photo to the left (click on it to enlarge it), Whorled Caraway leaves look quite different from grass. The first pic, above, was my attempt to show how the leaves' colour differed from that of the grasses surrounding them. It was more obvious than the photo shows.

Anyway, since I want these to flower later, I set about fencing them off marking them so that Toad doesn't mow the caraway patches by accident. Out came the canes and string – see pic below. The mower was round the corner of the bank in the left of the photo, and that is the loch you can see through the trees.

I call it the SE slope because it is on the SE side of the garden but the incline is actually north-easterly.

It's just as well we got that boggy bit mowed when we did because the heavens opened later that night and it has rained fairly steadily since.