Spring flowers and spring 'noticings' on the Boggy Brae

I went out with thick leather gloves and a hefty pair of loppers this morning meaning to yank out or cut down to the ground some of the large brambles encroaching on the Boggy Brae garden from outside its perimeter. Without a mechanical digger I'll never get rid of them all, nor do I want to, but they need to be kept in check or they'd take over. The lovely colours of the few plants already flowering distracted me from my task for a while.



The pink Oxalis leaves in the bottom right corner above are on a plant in my bedroom. I split and repotted a large plant last autumn and for months there was no sign of life in the pot housing this one. Next time I'll be prepared for the winter dormancy.

Having dealt with the brambles round the field boundary–great, several metre long snaggy shoots–I climbed over my dead hedge into the area under a big rhododendron and noticed this knotted Wild Cherry branch hanging down where it hadn't been before.



It seems something had fallen on it and broken it near the trunk. I've left it hanging there for now: more firewood in due course. I'd like to cut cleanly through the bit 'knot' to see the wood patterns inside it. The moss on the ground is mainly Atrichum undulatum (the darker green) and Plagiomnium undulatum. The amount of both has increased a lot since I raised the canopy of the rhododendron in 2014. It is Rhododendron ponticum and was bridging and expanding its empire too much!

Big rhodie a few years ago; allright when in flower but a dark encroaching monster the rest of the time!

Under the left end of the pic above I hope to have a lot of foxgloves this summer:

this little patch photographed last June
is now as below