On a walk across two fields

I went to see a pal who lives two fields away, I looked back at one point at this old field boundary of beech trees. There is the remains of an old drystone wall there too. I expect that was built before the trees grew.

We haven't had any rain for a week or so and the ground, usually soggy, was amazingly dry. I've noticed short dry periods like this in spring before in this part of Argyll. I was able to crawl under this fallen tree without getting wet. Bit of a shock to the sytem really when so much effort is spent trying to keep dry!

And look how dry the ground is round this cattle feeder! Positively weird! 🤣

In the first field I walked along the woodland boundary fence. On the other side of it is a wonderful bank of bluebells. I knew there were bluebells there but not that there were so many. Although I've been in that wood many a time, I guess I hadn't been there at bluebell time before. I must go back in a week or two to see them in flower before the other vegetation takes over.

bluebell bank

Further along, the other characteristic of this bank becomes apparent. You can walk along the top of it. Apparently it was part of a pilgrim's path to St.Modan's church in Rosneath where the relics of Modan, an abbot of the Celtic church in Scotland who then became a hermit in this area, were enshrined.

Another local saint is Gildas. There is a fuller Wiki article about him and a newish Catholic church (1968) in his name, also at Rosneath.

Another section of what, I'm told, was the Pilgrim's Way

The current hill track, that goes all the way to Kilcreggan (the 'kil' part in the name refers to a hermit's cell and 'creggan' to the cragginess of the coastline) but it is higher up the hill than the old Pilgrim's Way. It would make sense for the old Pilgrim's Way to be lower if they were heading for Rosneath.

Primrose, daisy, azalea

This photo was taken looking down squintwards on the primrose bank from beside the drystone wall above it. Some of the seeds from these plants have made their way over the wall and onto the terrace at the front of the house. Initially there was just one clump in the corner (not shown) but now there are these three new ones as well.

over the wall primroses

Also at the base of this wall there are numerous entrances of bank voles. It seems they sometimes nibble the daisies. Something does anyway.

half-nibbled

If you sit on the doorstep and look straight ahead, the flowers of the yellow azaleas,

which also grow on the front bank are now visible.

Moving bamboo

About eight years ago, when Toadlet was still at primary school, she wanted me to buy some plants at a school sale. One was a kind of spurge and one was a small pot of bamboo. I decided to make a kind of half basket for the steep bank up from the back terrace. The soil is thin there and is full of bits of old paint from before our time. I lined the basket with some leftover pond fleece and filled it with home-made compost. I planted the bamboo and the spurge in there. In this picture, taken in May 2014, you can see that the spurge did quite well. It has a lovely brightness about it, seeds profusely and spreads. There's some red campion behind it and also the bamboo, still small. It's actually quite hard to see in the photo but it is there. This is my one and only basket weaving effort and it stood the test of time. Until today.

I got Toad to help me dig the bamboo out. It had got somewhat taller and more robust-looking over the years and blocked a bit of the view up the garden. There were side shoots too. It needs more space to spread.

Here is where we dug. Yes, those are bricks at the back. Apparently there used to be a shed or garage of some sort on  what had been made into a flat concrete ledge. There isn't very much flat ground on the Boggy Brae. We used to park the Rattletrap on what we presume had been the floor of the garage. We found what Toad said was an old spark plug, some bits of broken glass, and another hard rusted and crusted bit of metal that was unidentifiable.

old spark plug and some broken glass

After that I wheelbarrowed the bamboo down to the Boggy Bottom of the garden, on the Scrawny the Tree side, and dug a hole. I dug out a couple of bricks here too. I think we'd start to worry if we didn't find bricks or bits of bricks every time we dug anywhere! Anyway, that hole is deeper than it looks and the bamboo went in just fine. I carefully avoided treading on the iris that has planted itself there.

Bamboo in its new place

From the Boggy Bottom it was nice to look up to wild cherry trees that are flowering away just now.

Toad is going to sell that Topaz dinghy. This is why I've changed from Boat Bog to Boggy Bottom. When that boat is sold, we'll be boatless.

Gardening Boggy Brae style when I'm not hacking overgrown hedges

Today I have been putting more plants in cages. This Roseroot among the mosses and grasses on the retaining wall at the back of the house was quite small ten years ago. It has gradually spread and there is another clump of it along from this. When I caged the Orpine last year, the roe deer just ate this instead (can you hear the gnashing of teeth (mine)?). They also nibbled the Reflexed Stonecrop that grows on the dry stone wall at the top of the front bank (cue more gnashing of teeth and growling) but that did flower in a few places and is now spreading, I notice, to the bank below the wall, among the Tamarisk moss and Hairy Wood-rushes.

I've also beeen pushing sticks into the ground (see right >>). On a trip to Oban in August three years ago, I passed a field of Wild Angelica and Purple Loosestrife. My plan to obtain a similar effect on the Boggy Brae is taking shape, at least as far as the angelica is concerned. The initial leaves are beginnng to show and I'm marking where they are so that I don't tread on them or mow them by mistake. There are about ten, so far, in the Boggy Bottom (aka front garden), including some at the edges of the yellow flag patch, and another ten or a dozen in the pond triangle.

wild angelica and purple loosestrife near Oban

My other task has been what seems to be an annual one of removing a queen wasp's nest from the shed. Some years I've done it more than once. The thing is to notice them when there is only the queen involved. I was in the shed today looking for something and thinking that this was about the time of year when a wasp nest would appear. Then I turned around and there one was! I use a jam jar to cover the nest and the edge of a postcard to scrape it off the roof. Then it's a case of put it down, flip the postcard off the top and run. The queens always seem a bit cross! As I would be, no doubt, if some giant scraped my house up!

The queens are welcome to build their nests elsewhere, just not in the shed. One year we had one in the back terrace retaining wall that's only three metres from the back door; it wasn't a problem.

Mid-April garden progress

The old, accidentally burnt out rowan near the top of the garden is still standing. It can be wobbled a little but the lignin in what's left of the old trunk is not giving way. Not yet.

As you can at the bottom of the picture, there is still a live shoot, a young a tree in its own right really, is growing. I wondered last year if it would survive to leaf and flower another year. It seems it will:

Even more amazingly, several small shoots are growing alongside this main one at the base of the old trunk and apparently right out of the fungus, Root Rot/Heterobasidion annosum, that was killing off the older parts. Talk about the will to live! 

Bluebells are not flowering here yet but their leaves are popping up in various parts of the garden, including just downhill of the old rowan.

Leaves of Hyacinthoides non-scripta

They are also springing up under Deep Pink whose flowers are falling.

Orpine (Sedum telephium) was doing well behind its chicken wire protection last year. It was fleshing out nicely this year too and then the vandal deer found a way in behind through the cotoneaster that it grows under. Grrr! 😠 So I've chicken wired behind it as well now.

The King Cups that a neighbour gave me on Wednesday, which were flowering well when I planted then had all their flowers and most of their leaves scoffed within forty-eight hours. Such depredations, even just of flowers that one isn't going to eat, can be a bit soul-destroying so I sympathise with people who have to cope with their growing food supply being eaten by other animals. I've made a chicken wire cage for the King Cups now too. Hey ho.

It is deer, both red and roe, that slow down forest regeneration in other parts of Scotland. There are none of their natural predators (wolves and lynx, for instance) left that would keep their numbers down a bit. There is talk of reintroducing such animals.

Violets have begun to flower, a month later than those of a friend in London, and they are a bit spindlyfor all their will to survive.

Catkins of sallow are still opening bit by bit.

While it has been too skiddy down by the pond in showery weather, I've been hacking some more of the sallow up top and stacking it along with some of the cypress wood wigwam that was collapsing.

sallow & cypress wood to dry out

I restacked some of what I'm calling the curly cypress wood that I cut last year. Some of it had slipped down over bluebells and we can't have that!

The Deep Pink rhododendron

There had been rain overnight making it too muddy to continue with my cave-making down by the pond, so between showers today I went on a welly wander turning first left out of the back door and then right to go up the back garden. The rhododendron that I call The Deep Pink is dropping its flowers now. I like their carpeting effect.

In amongst the fallen flowers are a few bluebell plants, nowhere near flowering yet on the Boggy Brae. Something to look forward to.

What's left when the flowers fall

Bibio johannis

I asked on Twitter what this beastie is called. Very kindly, Ian Beavis (@TWBC_Museum), replied. It is called Bibio johannis and is related to the larger St Mark's Fly, Bibio marci which flies later in the year.

Apparently St Mark's Fly is so called because it swarms at around the time of St Mark's Day, 25 April. Bibio johannis is known as the Black Gnat by anglers, it seems.

I spotted this one on an early piece of Wild Cherry blossom that got blown off the tree almost as soon as it opened on 8 April.

Steps to the pond

Toad decided to dig a pond in the summer of 2008. Toadlet (7) helped by leaning artistically on whichever tool he wasn't using. The chickens investigated.

Then the pond triangle, at the lowest part of the garden, was left to go wild. Toad is not really a gardener so upkeep didn't cross his mind before he dug the pond. I was too busy struggling to get the rest of the garden, which measures about 90x30 metres, and which had been neglected for about twenty-five years, under some sort of control. Then my energy ran out and I've had to pace myself. And Toad still isn't a gardener 😁. If I leave him a polite note, giving him plenty of notice to get used to the idea in advance, he will mow a section of lawn on a sunny day like today. Given the bogginess and the slope of the land that's a hard job so it helps a lot, leaving me time and energy to hack my way into the pond triangle in what I hope will be a sustainable way.

I made the mistake at first of cutting the many old and monstrous rhododendrons down. I now realise that it's probably better to cut them up, that is to raise their canopies and prevent any side branches from bridging and rooting, which is what Rhododendron ponticum likes to do.

So now I am cutting between the rhododendrons that were planted long ago for a hedge and am going to let them increase in height but not in width.  Another of the pluses of this approach is that I can see the pond from the inside the house.

Making a footpath and sight path to the pond

Today, at the steepest part above the pond, I made a step. I'm dead chuffed with it; never made a step before. I found a suitable piece of wood next to the washing machine (as you do if you're me and have a cluttered old wash-house full of things that might be useful one day, and things that are already useful, I hasten to add!) and walloped some very dead branches of rhododendron wood into the ground to hold a stone and the wood in place. I think I'll make another step down from that too because in wet weather it can be very slippery down there and there's no point increasing the rate of erosion if one can avoid it. There's another similar piece of wood in the shed. As I hack back the overgrown bushes I'm making woodpiles. There will be bonfires in due course.



All these piles are now bigger than they were when I took these photos and there are two more green ones.

Below are two pond watchers a year or so after it was dug.

 Meanwhile, on another garden step, one of those going up to the shed, this year's first Boggy Brae violet is flowering. Wild cherry trees are beginning to flower too.

Wild cherry blossom