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.

Pink ribbons and old boats

On days when there is some time before my bus is due I start walking home along the loch's shore road. Some months ago, when overhanging shrubs and trees were being cut back at the sides of the road, pink plastic ribbons appeared tied to branches and fence posts. It took me a while to figure out that while the general slashing of roadside vegetation was happening, the pink markers were for things that needed more work than a mere machine slash. Like this tree (sallow? there's a lot of that):

too much for a mere slash

Toad and I used to worry about shrub slashing. What's left when the machine has done its work makes the method seem brutal but such is the rate of growth in what amounts to our temperate rainforest climate that the shrubs soon recover. Hazel and sallow are not subdued for long and the road does need to be kept open.

Yesterday the bus passed me at the head of the loch going the other way so I knew it had a sixteen mile round trip to do plus the couple of miles I'd have walked by the time it reached me again so I set off in search of pink ribbons. I untied ten or so and pocketed them. They'll be used as plant markers in the garden.

And so I came upon a dead boat on a steep bank down to the sea where the roadside slashing had partly opened up the undergrowth. Its name is Caol Ila. There is a whisky distillery of this name on the western isle of Islay. The name apparently means 'Sound of Islay' where sound means a narrow strip of water. The Gaelic word Caol is Kyle in English which occurs in other place names such as Kyle of Lochalsh. Apparently the pronunciation is "cull-eela".

The boat Caol Ila
with its old pulley yanker for getting it out of the water

Today I walked the same route before the bus caught up with me and took pics of another dead boat, one that I already knew about as it's readily visible on the shore, and another boat yanker-outer. Also a massive thing that looks like a metal float.

On a wind chilled day in March

During the visit by Toadlet's Spanish school exchange partner Toad thought a visit to the Victorian Gothic Revival house, Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute, would be a nice weekend outing. The day we thought most suitable turned out to be during the time the Mini Beast from the East weather phenomenon was hitting the UK. Although the ambient temperature in our part of western Scotland was about 0ºC, the wind chill was huge. We checked the website to make sure the house was open. We packed flasks of soup,  coffee, and peanut butter cookies into the car along with two down sleeping bags and took our "big coats".

On the way, via Rest and Be Thankful, we had a camera stop at ButterBridge across Kinglas Water, built by Redcoats under General Caulfield in 1745.
Ice patterns around stones in the river were pretty and icicles hung in the arch. The wind chill blasted us good and proper as we got out of the car.

The central bump in this pic is Beinn Ime, which we can also see from home on clear days

We took the ferry from Colintraive over to Bute and continued on to Mount Stuart. The house was not open. We sighed with studied patience. Toad sent an email after we got home explaining the confusing information on the website and, in reply, was granted two free tickets to see the house during 2018.

We turned around and made our way around Bute stopping to check out Scalpsie Bay where seals are often seen. We saw no seals but had another wind-chill-tastic, bracing escapade from the car.



Toadlet wanted to have what would now be a late lunch in Inveraray so we headed that way. We ate in the George Hotel and then did a tour of the fascinating Inveraray Jail. I asked our Spanish visitor if she thought Spanish jails of the same period were better. "Worse", she said. Certainly this jail must have been one of the first, if not the the first, to have central heating!

The heating wasn't on for our visit! We went back to the George for hot chocolate before setting off home.

Nearly forgot: I spotted my first Colt's-foot flower of the season near Butter Bridge.

A concert, a scarf, and a flag

Photo from http://www.rsno.org.uk

On Saturday Toad and I went to listen to this concert by the Royal Scottish Symphony Orchestra (RSNO) at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. It was fantastic, all of it. When I was a student at Dundee and went to concerts in the Caird Hall the orchestra was the humble SNO.

Caird Hall, Dundee
photo from Wikipedia, Creative Commons

Beforehand we had been to BurgerKing and had Aberdeen Angus burgers. Anyone who thinks burgers are junk food hasn't had an Aberdeen Angus one. The banana and strawberry smoothie was also very good. We got one to share but I drank nearly all of it because Toad said it made his forehead cold and he didn't want to get a cold-headache before the concert. Fine by me 😉

After the concert we made our way to the station for the train home. While we were waiting a couple passed us and I thought I recognised the tartan of the scarf the man was wearing. It wasn't until I noticed an abandoned Scottish flag on a bench and the man commented on it as I picked it up that I felt able to ask him about the scarf. It was indeed the Ancient Green Douglas tartan that I had guessed it was. I guessed right because that is the tartan I chose for my dem dancing sash many years ago–blue and green together and nothing riotous. You can't really see it in this blurry old photo from 2002 in Oxford Town Hall (I'm at the 'front') but you can see how we ruched the sashes over our right shoulders and, from a couple of the others, how they hung down behind. A token gesture to the old blanket plaids that kept people warm.

Sadly my sash, being wool, got rather moth-eaten so it got recycled. I still have the thistle pin that pinned it in place though. Needs a lick of silver polish!