Burnt out rowan

After torrential rain and ferocious winds yesterday the stillness of this silver morning enticed me out for a welly wander. This photo is from the top of the garden looking east.
Below is a photo of the birch, cypress and rowan clump in the middle of which is my fire basket. The wee shed in the front was once a goose house and then henhouse; now it acts as small woodshed.  The top corner is behind all that.

Oops!

It seems a spark must have got into the hollow trunk of the old rowan and, without noticeable smoke and through the drenching rain, it has burnt out the rotting wood. It must have been incredibly dry in there! The remaining part of that tree, seen above the goose house, still looks fine. It will be interesting to see what happens next spring.

So my unsmothering of the rowans under the cypress will continue over the winter. Not that the boggy brae is short of rowans; I've lost count of the number of rowan seedlings all over the place. Left to go wild the garden would soon turn into a forest of birch, rowan, holly, sallow, oak, wild cherry and beech. I find that a reassuring thought even if there were rhododendrons in the mix. I read somewhere that before the last ice age there were native rhododendrons in Britain anyway. Nothing stays the same for long.

More bonfires

Continuing the bonfire theme, I'm also lighting fires under the big cypress in the top south corner. A big chunk of it, a couple of heavy trunks' worth, has keeled over without any help from me but from Root Rot, sometimes known as Root Fomes (Heterobasidion annosum), which is also attacking the old rowan up there.

Root Rot fungus

I've felt tempted a few times to just light a fire under some of the low branches where detritus has fallen and collected over a number of years as you can see here. But I thought such a fire might quickly get huge and out of control and anyway part of the job is sort of about rescuing some half smothered rowan trees. The light-coloured branch on the ground is a rowan trunk, believe it or not. Most of the tree emerges on the field side of the fence.

birch, rowan, dying cypress from the field

There is another rowan trunk in among these rooting cypress branches.

So instead of setting a tree on fire, I'm lopping off small bits at a time and keeping the fire, more or less, within the confines of the fire basket that's visible in the first photo.

In moments between feeding the fire I've been enjoying small details: the redness of the cypress under bark, small fans of feather moss, and baby ferns growing in bark depressions.

Just in case someone happening to wander up the hill (likelihood close to zero, actually) to where the fire is (another close to zero likelihood) without noticing the smoke, I have my warning sign – a beachcombed part of a "Warning! forest operations" sign.

Actually, I use it as a bellows for the fire.

At some point I suppose I might get someone with a chainsaw to chop up the big branches but there's a lot of bonfiring fun to have before that.

Unbridging Rhododendron ponticum

Bit by bit I am raising the canopy–or, as I put it inside my head, unponting the ponticum where ponting means bridging from Latin pons meaning bridge–of the large rhododendron on the south-east side of the boggy brae garden. The area of ground it covered was getting larger and larger and the get-at-ability of some parts of the garden near it was getting harder and harder. Also some of its bridges were putting down roots. In due course this would have speeded up its conquering of more and more garden space. Enough was enough and I wanted to be able to walk underneath it without it trying to scalp me. One of the most effective and fun ways to deal with its rooting offspring is, I discovered, to light a fire at the bottom of one of them and burn various bits of garden prunings including the leafy branches. In due course the bridged and rooted extension keels over, one saws or twists off the trunk part, burns the small stuff and leaves (they burn very well), and stacks the thicker logs on the bridge stack for cutting into wood stove lengths in due course.

a keeled over R.ponticum offspring

the 'bridges' wood stack

only this and a few of the 'hangers' in the first photo to go

Bricky Copse

Standing on top of a compost heap,  which is now taller than the fence between us and the copse, to offload hedge trimmings, I noticed this array of mushrooms and went to have a closer look. I don't know what they are yet.

The sheep that were in the field have eaten down the low vegetation (in spring there is a carpet of opposite-leaved golden saxifrage) revealing the large stones and bricks that make up the floor of the copse. There are mossed over concrete steps at both sides of the copse. Someone whose family lived here for a good chunk of the twentieth century told me there was prisoner of war accommodation there during the First World War. The prisoners worked on local farms apparently.

Another interesting thing in the copse is this split trunk of an old sallow. From this split the trunk spreads almost horizontally in two directions over an area about 20metres wide.

The photo below shows the copse from further up the field. The sallow is the one at the front. Its lower leaves have been eaten leaving bare branches. There is birch, sycamore, holly, hawthorn, elder, dog rose in the copse as well. The dog rose grows all the way up to the top of the hawthorn which, from the right, is the third in after elder and holly. At the left end, over the fence in the boggy brae garden is the famous 'Scrawny' (some kind of cypress).

The Bricky Copse on a misty day

Walking back up the field to my sheepskin "sit-upon-ery" that doubles as protection when climbing over barbed wire fences, I enjoyed the autumn look of dock plants. Also their leafy readiness for next year's growth where bracken has been trampled.

A tiny rose

Irrepressible Rose has produced a tiny flower despite the best efforts of roe deer to prevent it from doing so by eating its young shoots. I'm guiding the shoots, as they get long enough, behind the trellis to afford the plant more protection...

...because they are still eating new leaves.

We have had a lot of heavy rain so the colchicum is looking somewhat rain battered. 

As autumn progresses, the late afternoon and evening light on the hillside across the loch is sometimes lovely, like last night when it coppered the bracken in a warm glow.

Mist in the trees

We have had torrential rain, even by western Scotland standards, today. It has eased off now but the road along the coast is awash in various places. Looking up the hill from the back door, I love the way the memory of rain hangs in between the trees while the air is still saturated.


The two bare trunks are the woodpecker trees. We often hear them hammering away.

Gall midges, flowers and leaves

In a break between rain pourings yesterday I went out to look at leaves, aka greenness. The lobelia and the yellow loosestrife caught my eye. Flowers do that :)

But the greens did too, especially of this fern with leaves at various stages, the basal rosette of a Cat's-ear growing in a boggy bit, and some aquilegia.

And then I spotted something new which turned out to be midge galls of the Gall Midge (Dasineura ulmaria) on meadowsweet leaves. Apparently they turn red as they progress.

Bothwell Castle and Woods by the Clyde

On Sunday Little She Bear and I visited Bothwell Castle. We both loved its impressiveness of scale, the beautiful red sandstone it's made of and its situation beside the Clyde with the wonderful woods alongside. The visit has inspired us to walk the Clyde Walkway in stages between the World Heritage Site at New Lanark to Cambuslang where King Arthur, prince of the Welsh-speakers of Strathclyde, is reputed to have fought his last battle against invading Saxons.

We walked all around the outside of the castle before going in and paying the entrance fee, which we were happy to pay to help Historic Scotland, now called Historic Environment Scotland, keep this magnificent ruin from deteriorating further.

From the back we found a way down the steep bank to the River Clyde into the wonderful Bothwell Woods.

Lots of evidence of children's (probably group) visits to the woods which was nice to see...




...and lots of sheer tree beauty. We both loved this enormous sycamore tree. It had several trunks so is probably several close together but at first sight it looks like one. Sycamores, like ashes, are weeds on our little peninsula north of the Clyde, growing tall and spindly for the most part, and in their hundreds. This one, or this group, showed how even common trees can be amazing plants when they have space to breathe, as it were.


Looking up into the canopy and down at reflections in the river on such a lovely day was also a great experience.


We enjoyed the sand ripples at the edge of the river and the evidence of sand layering in progress before making our way back up the riverbank. In the third photo, there is a tiddler; it looks like a little shadow in the pic. There were shoals of them.

And so, up to and into the castle we went. The grass really is that green.

We sat on one of the benches to eat our lunch of pork pie, cold boiled new potatoes with some mayonnaise to dip them in, tomatoes (those three brought by me), cheese and chutney sandwiches, apple, nuts and raisins, home-grown cucumber (those brought–made, in the case of the chutney– by LSB. Pooled picnics are the best.

Below is a small section of Bothwell Woods along the Clyde seen from the top of the castle keep.

We continued to enjoy the beautiful red sandstone both as used in the castle build, but also for its own sake. Beautiful stuff.

A little repair

Stone 'shot' for a trebuchet

A stonemason's mark

I think I need to bring my grandsons here, sometime.