Chocolate puddings and ferns

After some chores I sat down on a pallet with a pot of chocolate Gü and a mug of tea.

I'm testing chocolate puddings for when my grandsons visit. Their other grandparents down in England supply Mini Magnums so I decided to be the supplier of chocolate puds. I make a fabulous mocha upsidedown sponge pud but sometimes one needs something that comes in a little pot which is best eaten with a baby's little horn spoon.

I'm giving the Gü thing five out of ten so I won't be buying it again. I had to read what it said on the box after eating it to know what it was supposed to taste of––other than chocolate of course. Not impressed with what they call "our richest ganache yet" and I'm a bit of a ganache expert.

Anyway, moving on...

I looked at the next task while I had my snackeroo: this wall of ferns

I wanted to clear the larger ferns back to the wall before they shot their spores everywhere. We have plenty of ferns and though I like them I feel I do have to limit them a bit or they'd smother everything else. I also wanted to check out what else is growing on this damp holding wall. Some people actually plant vertical walls with stuff. Nature just does it herself at the Boggy Brae.

Here is a small section with

Athyrium filix-femina (Lady Fern)

Phyllitis scolopendrium (Hart's-tongue Fern)

Asplenium trichomanes (Maidenhair Spleenwort).

The tiny white flowers are Enchanter's Nightshade. I think it is Alpine Enchanter's Nightshade because the leaf bases are heart-shaped rather than truncate.

And then there are mosses and liverworts growing on the actual stones

plus a few other things

The main liverwort is Crescent-cup Liverwort (Lunularia cruciata) on this section of wall.

You can see one of the crescent cups with 'gemmae' in it near the bottom centre of this pic.

 Same liverwort with female 'receptacles' (those pointy dot things)

and a red-stemmed moss that I'm not sure about yet.

I found a tiny purple grub during my pokings and peerings;

took this shot under the microscope and then put it back where it was.

It was about 15mm long.

 That bit of wall looks like this now.

I stopped at this bunch of ferns because there is a wasps' nest in the wall behind them. The wasps haven't been a bother so we have left them alone.

Hard Fern in my garden

There is a lot of Hard Fern (Blechnum spicant) in the Boggy Brae garden. Like several other species of fern, it thrives on our damp, acid hillside. I like them and I'm slowly learning more about them. The photos in this blog post show how Blechnum spicant changes through the year.

29 April: evergreen infertile fronds that over-wintered
and new fertile fronds unfurling

11 May: the tall red stems of the fertile fronds
show above the lower-growing inertile fronds

6 June: I took this photo because I liked the light

6 August: the largest plant –
a metre wide and a metre high

Same plant 11 Aug: different angle
near the base of a downy birch tree

16 Aug: light green infertile fronds
and dark-stemmed, narrow-leaved fertile fronds

16 Aug: if you enlarge this pic you'll just be able to see
the sori on the backs of the leaves.
Can't take a better pic at the moment as it's raining

Den Rose needed pruning...

...so I went at it with a will today. It's looking a bit bare where it and its neighbouring ferns were but a good clear gave me a chance to get at brambles, a sapling plum tree that we don't want there and no fewer than four small sycamore trees. The rose and the ferns will sally forth next year with their usual gusto (and so will more sycamore seedlings!). The rose has put roots down in five places along the 9+ metres of ground it covers during the summer. I only prune it this severely every three years or so. Ground elder, yarrow, slender St.John's wort, and triteleia (the only thing I've planted, transferred from our old Oxfordshire garden) also grow among the ferns. It's quite a jungle in summer.

The width (over nine metres) of the den rose in summer
Main roots in middle of pic with gorse to the left and Escallonia to the left of that

The grass in the foreground is long because I'm waiting for the whorled caraway to set seed before I scythe it.

The original den rose rooting spot
which is just to the right of the gorse

Don't worry, we won't run out of ferns. I scythed the bank in the pic below just a couple of weeks ago.

We won't run out of ribwort plantain either – another bit of the front bank. I think I'll start referring to them as the fern bank and the plantain bank.

Wayside flowers on the road to Lochgilphead

I was delighted to see stands of Purple Loosestrife on my way to and from Lochgilphead today as they don't commonly grow near the Boggy Brae.

The A83 is a tricky road to pull over on so I'd missed a few stands of the flowers before I saw a dirt track turn off into the forest. Just as well I was in Rab the Rattler (alias "the truck") which is happy on squishy mud. Someone with a posh car wouldn't have opened this gate and turned around in here: 

But I did

A tiny part of Lochgilphead in a back lane

In the same back lane a lovely red honeysuckle

Travelling home again I had a better idea of the best places to stop so that I could get a picture of the swathes of wild angelica with purple loosestrife mixed in

Lots of marshy areas like this just off the road

absolutely full of wild angelica

Some purple loosestrife with meadowsweet

and here with more, very tall angelica

Finally a lovely tall ash tree near where I stopped.

You can just see the corner of the rattletrap bottom right.

And between travelling to and from Lochgilphead I had lunch with a friend. As the crow flies we do not live far apart, but as the roads go, following the winding coasts of sea lochs, it's a fair distance. A lovley journey between mountains and alongside beautiful lochs though. A happy day.

Why Rosebay Willowherb isn't...

...flowering at the Boggy Brae

It is chomped,

suspected culprits include roe deer and rabbits

and I think that most people would be glad.

I was rather looking forward to it.

It has a certain brave beauty.

I had decided (are you MAD? asked DivingDaughter) to let it flower this year and not try to pull it up as I usually do (without much success regarding its roots, I have to admit, because the seeds seem to lodge themselves into other plants' roots before developing). So much for that. Hey ho.

Chomped and regrowing by some white heather

Chomped and not regrowing
Looks as if something's been at the leaves too
exposing that wonderful redness of stalk

Chomped by the peony
which had one flower this year

Magnetic hippo had an accident

Or, as Toadlet used to call them, a nastident (nasty dent?).

He had climbed onto the wash-house door latch

but Toadlet, without seeing him, shut the door somewhat, ahem, vigorously

and brought him in de-magnetted

:-O

Still smiling though!

He had an operation which involved strong glue

and now he is convalescing on a soap dish.

Under an old plum tree

The largest plum it has ever produced in the time we've known it, an inch long!

I say plum but its fruits are so small I have wondered at times whether it's really a damson. I know the tree is old because someone who grew up here and who is now in her sixties said it was there when she was a child and used to eat too many at once! One easy lesson in how to get a belly-ache. Funny how kids just have to learn the hard way sometimes. Here is a picture, taken in April, of its blossom – what the bullfinches didn't scoff while still in bud.

I was under the plum tree a good deal this morning, scything the top part of the bank. During breathers I had time to look about me and appreciate, yet again, the beauty of my surroundings and how lucky I am to be in a place I love. It was a blue sky, sparkly loch summer day with a good, cooling breeze blowing from the south-east.