Snowdrops 2021

 The first snowdrops of 2021 have appeared on the Boggy Brae. They are under an azalea on the steep, northeast-facing front bank and it is this group that appear first every year.

The Tamarisk moss through which this one is growing is looking good too

On the southeast-facing part of the bank, there is a primrose plant that has not stopped flowering since last spring. Near it some others are looking promising.

Summer hols

Toad spent much of our summer leave drawing and painting, learning new tunes on his keyboard, and mending the shed. I spent much of the first week of mine recovering – hobbledehee, hobbledeho – from a wrench to my back that happened on the first day. During the second week, eldest daughter Rye came up with her boys, Moo and Oink. When Rye arrives it seems she often ends up cooking dinner. I'm happy with this. This time it seems my estimates of how much pasta was necessary to feed however many of us there were, how much cheese sauce to make, and so on, were inadequate. We rummaged through some of Toadlet's student digs bags and found some more pasta which Rye tipped into the pot. She then made the sauce while I did useful things like finding an ovenproof dish to put the giant macaroni cheese in and sending boys in search of more chairs. All the macaroni cheese was eaten. I keep thinking, if Moo and Oink eat so much now, aged nine and six, what will they be like in their teens!?

Here they are making a rope out of goosegrass:

We spent a fair bit of time down on the beach puddling about and searching for treasure. Rye collects crockery handles, for example.

We were intrigued by this beastie that looks similar at first glance to a woodlouse. The stone it was on appeared to be the back of an old tile.

One day we went for a walk around Ardmore Point in the Clyde. It's a lovely little wild nature reserve full of wild flowers. If the tide's out you can walk much of the way on the beach, which we did, but we also had a look in the woods.

Finding harebells

There were some white ones too:

white harebells

Towards the end of our walk we spotted a mouse on the path. We froze and got some photos of it. It seemed utterly unconcerned by us though and even allowed Moo and Oink to stroke it before it toddled back in the the undergrowth. Oink wanted to bring it home and keep it as a pet but he already has a cat so we argued against that idea. Given the mouse's carelessly dreamy attitude I rather thought it would be owl food that night anyway.

The light drizzle that went on most of the day didn't bother us at all. On the way home we shopped for grub for a crowd. Dinner the next day was going to be baked spuds with this and that and something else followed by a colourful fruit salad, Moo's request, and ice-cream, including soy ice-cream for the partner of J-of-the-wolves who has to avoid dairy products.

So that day all three of my daughters were here with their partners, whom I'm calling Pointy, Hilly, and Hezza unless objections are raised. Rye and Pointy hadn't met Hilly yet and no-one except the BoggyBraers had met Hezza, so it was a grand mixing together.

It was lovely having the visitors, thoroughly enjoyable, but I had apparently got quite tired: when I got home from work on Monday my nap lasted four hours!

Small garden things

I've been pulling New Zealand Willowherb (Epilobium brunnescens) off the holding wall at the back of the back terrace. I like its tininess and its flowers but it is rather invasive and I wanted to check the hornwort that was also growing there was still around. This meant pulling off quite a lot of ferns as well. (It also meant I got black fingernails which needed well scrubbed!) The ferns are well rooted so they'll grow back. Ferns need no encouragement on Boggy Brae. They are some of the boss plants!

Having taken the camera out to photograph the hornwort (I think it is Field Hornwort/Antheros agrestis), I wandered about looking at other small things, including the very ferny-looking moss, Hart's-tongue Thyme-moss (Plagiomnium undulatum).

Field Hornwort in its mossy and liverworty

environment

Hart's-tongue Thyme-moss

Broad-leaved Willowherb
growing through ferns

Enchanter's Nightshade.
I think we actually have the hybrid,
Upland Enchanter's Nightshade

From a patch, one of many, that I have left to grow wild, I pulled up seven or eight downy birch seedlings. On the underside of a leaf of one of them was this intriguing blueish ball. Then a spider came charging up the tiny tree and went into guard the ball mode so I'm guessing this is a spider egg sac. I put the wee tree and the titchy, probably very annoyed spider in among the ferny undergrowth to recover from the assault. 😬

Scale to a five pence coin

Loving the exquisite tininess of what I think is Wall Speedwell (Veronica arvensis) in the morning shadow of the Den Rose wall. That is a 5p coin for scale. In the third photo there are four little shoots.

Other tinies this morning include my first spotting this year of Cornsalad (Valerianella locusta) and today's favourite daisy. Also an old and tiny 'maggleflying glass' (infant Toadlet word) that I found at my mother's house recently while sorting out its hoard of parent and grandparent belongings–more on that in another post anon.

Valerianella locusta

The little magnifier has lost one lens and needs to have all that clart cleaned off it

but the remaining lens works well.

Digging out docks

That's dock plants, Rumex obtusifolius, not docks for boats. It was a mild day so my 'gansey' was soon not required.

Gate hanger.                                                             Gansey hanger

The "pond primula" is flowering. It seemed to carry on flowering for months last year.

Although Lesser Celandines have been flowering down by the loch for almost three weeks now, today was the first time they have made a proper showing in the garden.

Field Woodrush also:

The bright green blades are of grass; you might be able to make out the knob at the point of the murkier green leaf of the woodrush.

Orchid markers

Went out with my scythe and a rake this afternoon and cut back another patch of what I had let grow wild last year, in aid of the spread of wild angelica and northern marsh orchids (as well as the usual meadow buttercups and lesser spearworts). Being at the boggy bottom of the Boggy Brae, there was a good deal of rush and moss. Having cut and raked I poked around in search of signs of orchids. It's none of your big rosettes such as people are finding further south of early purple orchids, just the tiniest of pointed shoots down in the deep moss. I did not mark the ones I found down there but I did give ones on the back terrace some protection from careless feet. In the third picture, the orchid shoot is a wee blob in the top left corner.

 

I use bricks here because under all that moss and daisy rosette world is gravel and concrete so sticks can't go in very far. Below is a pic of the boggy bottom garden in June last year showing how I mowed around stuff.

The main northern marsh orchid patch is below the stand of Iris pseudacorus. The flowers in the bottom right of the b&w photo, which I like because it shows the slope of that part of the brae so well (it's steeper up to the right where the shadows are), are devil's bit scabious.

Lophocolea Stump Part 3

I had an enjoyable morning bumbling about on the south slope of the garden. I saw my first two bees of the year foraging in the gorse that grows against the den (Toad calls it his studio).

First bee I've seen; spot the spider also.

Between scything swathes of the main Whorled Caraway patch, I took some pics of the old spruce stump that I nicknamed the Lophocolea Stump on account of this liverwort covering its top surface. More about that can be seen here in an old post. Below are some of today's photos showing its progress or rotting down, breaking down and being broken down–magpies in particular seem to like jabbing at it.


Whorled Caraway leaf and the patch I scythed and raked. It will fill with pignut flowers and then whorled caraway as the year progresses.


What's growing on the stump. I need to gen up on moss names. There are at least four mosses including a polytrichum, what I think is Common Tamarisk Moss, Springy Turf Moss, as well as Heath Bedstraw.


The west and east faces of the stump today: