A flowery drive and a garden walk

Yellow buttercups,

White cow parsley,

Hazy pink of massed sorrel,

Coloured my drive along the loch.

Then over the pass and into the glen,

The light bright white of cotton grass

Splattering the moor.

On the low road again by the loch

Came red campion and more white,

Pignut this time.

I thank the councils for letting

The roadside verges flower.

Home from helping at a school have-a-go archery session, and I wandered round the garden with my camera again. June is good for that.

Azalea

A baby rowan, a baby hawthorn,
and some baby ivy and some dry (yes, dry!) moss.

Fuchsia

Rhododendron with a backdrop of birch

This year's crop of Ragged Robin.
Three years ago there was one. Now here are six flowering stalks and another nearly ready.
I let them set seed by themselves.

Posting these photos, I remembered the other fuchsia – what I call the Fairy Fuchsia. The common type spreads itself with free abandon and grows like, well, fuchsia. The Fairy Fuchsia hides itself higher up the garden behind other bushes and against a south-east-facing stone wall. It is a pale and delicate version of its robust relative.

"Fairy fuchsia"

And while I was tramping up there, through thigh-high grass, to search it out, I nearly trod on this:

This year's first boggybrae orchid.

I checked the state of the Japanese knotweed that, seven years ago, filled a large portion of the garden. We have noticed this year that something – we know not what – is eating the stuff! Could it be environmental adaptation by some nibbling insect? I hope so. Meanwhile, though it is not eradicated yet, elsewhere it is already nearly two metres tall but ours only manages this:

Japanese knotweed 7 years on

Coming downhill again, I enjoyed the ever more extensive spread of heath bedstraw, the grasses blowing in the apple tree meadow, and some irises:

Heath bedstraw with the tip of my welly for scale

A bit of the apple tree meadow

Irises, pignut, sorrel and (I think) hard fern

One day I will get a glowing shot of buttercups in the boggiest bit of the boggybrae. Massed as they are at this time of year, they present a glorious cheerfulness to the world. I love seeing them in the roadside verges and in the boggy lawn at the bottom of the garden. As you walk or drive up the track and swing into boggybrae territory they force a smile, and as you chunter up the drive to the house the rhodies present you with this ground view:

Rhododendron blossom on the drive

A not-quite-what-I'm-aiming-at buttercup shot
with still-to-flower yellow flag leaves behind.