Sticks and elderflower cake

Last June friends helped us with some tree lopping including of this prunus species on the front bank. This was at the end of a busy afternoon so I turned down their offer of help to clear up the branches. Four days later I fell and broke my arm. I did shift some of the more scattered logs and twiggy bits but not this pile. I probably added to it actually!

And so it has stayed there over the winter as more urgent garden jobs came up. As spring approached I thought of tackling it again but then noticed what was growing into it: primroses.




I decided to leave the sticks be for now rather than risk ripping up the flowers. Lower down the bank a lot more primroses have seeded, making a cheering sight through this year's cold spring.

Up the bank from that pile of sticks and the tree they came from is a single self-seeded cowslip. I've put a cage round it to prevent it being cropped by roe deer. The other day I found a tiny mushroom beside it.

I'm never short of other branches to tackle. Yesterday Toad helped me remove these and a couple more from the ridiculous dragon hedge down the drive then informed me he'd invited some archers to come and shoot here today! "They'll want cake!" I said. Toad said not and I'm sure they'd be perfectly charming about there being no cake at a Boggy Brae archery shoot but it's a tradition now! More notice of such events in future has been requested from Toad.

Found a recipe for elderflower cake so I'd better get cracking assembling ingredients.

The Lesser Celandines by the pond were looking particularly luminous yesterday.

Deep Pink is still alive

The deep pink flowering rhododendron in the back garden is flowering. I had my doubts whether it would stay alive at all this cold, wet spring as many of the buds grew mould. Deep Pink's sister tree died a few years ago and only the trunks are left.

mould on buds

It's good to see the shrub has survived another winter.

Nine months between

In early July last year, the middle part of the top of the garden looked like this:

Yesterday it looked like this:

It has less than three months to perform its metamorphosis. I'm expecting fewer montbretia leaves because roe deer have been scraping up the corms and eating them. I'm not sure if there will be fewer Peruvian lilies too.

There is a bitter east wind again today but the lungwort that didn't flower last year is doing so now, wild daffodils are opening, the forsythia, wind-battered, flowers bravely on, and the washus door snail looks jolly.

The Barber and the Cobbler

After a visit to the barber where all three of us in this pic had a haircut, we repaired to the beach across the road from her shop where some of us got our socks  wet, all of us made a shell collection, and all of us picnicked.

driftwood & shells

Then up the hill (steep bank of the Clyde) to the park by the church where MM and HH played while mum and gran sat in the sun and looked across the broad river.

Next day we headed up to Arrochar to start a walk. Extra socks were required in wellies and it's just as well I have two pairs of hiking boots that also fit my daughters' feet because two of them have borrowed boots recently.

It is quite a trudge up through the trees. MM, being a mountain goat of a boy, found it easy enough, but HH decided to crawl and collect rocks by the time we could see the top–well, some of the top. Without proper boots (and one person who passed us going down had an ice-axe) we couldn't go right up. Maybe next summer?

The Cobbler (Ben Arthur) 30 March 2018

Back down in Arrochar we stopped at the 3 Villages Cafe for cups of tea and kid drinks. Even though they were just about to close (last early closing of the season before they open longer hours for the summer months) they kindly made us tea to take away. 

Yesterday, DerbyshireDaughter and Toad went to a piano recital meetup at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire while I took the boys to Kelvingrove Museum. We were unable to pass the Bing Soul Desserts cafe on the walk from Partick Station without going in and sampling.