Toadlet moves on

Toadlet grew up. Yesterday we drove her and her essential clobber over to her Edinburgh student digs. We forgot pillows so Toad was sent out for those and I was given the task of stashing the kitchen bstuff and clothes in appropriate places. Sitting in her room at her desk ready for Freshers' Week she looked to be in her element.

From the kitchen of the student flat there is a close view of Salisbury Crags and another, across East Lothian and along the Firth of Forth, to North Berwick Law (phone pics so kept small).


We have a good feeling about this phase of her life. Go, Toadlet!

Mid-morning we left Toadlet to get stuck into her new life and head towards Newhaven to visit J-of-the-Wolves*, hitherto DivingDaughter on this blog, at her new flat with her partner. Their fourth floor flat has a direct view across town of Edinburgh Castle Rock and any firework displays that happen to be set off there. Neat! Items from J's past can be spotted about the flat, such as her teddy, Sha-Sha, acquired at a church jumble sale with GrandmaB in Poulton-le-Fylde when J was three. Sha-Sha had been 'pre-loved' and was subjected to a good scrubbing by Grandma. He has survived well. And then there's a piece of Welsh dressed slate that had been left at Llwyngwern Quarry, now part of the land encompassed by the Centre for Alternative Technology, where J worked for a couple of years. Hanging on one wall is a felt patchwork representation of a 10x10 Graeco-Latin square that I made some decades ago. Its colours have faded a bit. Perhaps it's time to make another in different fabrics.


After coffee at the house of J and S we all four headed off to see the Kelpies at Falkirk and then the Falkirk Wheel.

It was a landmark, lovely day altogether. Toad did all the driving and this morning has gone off to his archery coach training in Milngavie. I'm feeling that recognisable ME/chronic fatigue 'nausea' so am going to have a restful day at home enjoying my new freedom. Toadlet and I have that in common right now!

*The 'J-of-the-Wolves' reference is both to J's activity in the women's team of the Edinburgh Wolves American Football club and to the books about Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George that I read many years ago.


Signing off this post with some purple loosestrife I saw growing by the Forth and Clyde Canal near the Kelpies. I want some of this to grow with the wild angelica in the Boggy Brae garden. I've seen it in that mix elsewhere in Argyll but not near us. Time to get hold of some seed, I think.

A memory of Grandpa

Been busy in the garden and am downing a whole pot of tea with toast and marmalade. This cupful reminded me of my Grandpa who once overfilled his teacup while I was staying with him and Grandma and then bent down to slurp the tea without picking the cup up. Grandma was very proper and was outraged (in a quiet way). Grandpa winked at four year old me.

Welly wanders are good for aches

Went for a welly wander in the drippy, midgy weather. It, along with some painkillers, was to ease hangover fibromyalgic aches from yesterday's gardening stints. Very effective when you find such delightful fungal forms and colours.

I'm also finding the limits of my iPhone5 camera. Its pocketability is its redeeming virtue.

Ash dieback

Today Toad and I cut down two young ash trees and burned their foliage. They were diseased with the ash dieback fungus, Hymenoscyphus fraxineus. They were not badly affected yet but the first signs were there and since they were growing in a wrong place anyway (under the tall cypress we I call "Scrawny"; Toad does not give trees names) and would have to come down sooner or later, the finding of the disease symptoms was a good time to do it.

We have not burned the trunks. They can be cut into lengths and burned in the stove over the winter. Ash doesn't need to season to burn well, as we found even with the small branches and green leaves,

though I did help the fire along with some of the rhododendron and snowberry twigs that I cut in spring last year. It went well even with the finest of fine mizzle in the air.

The yellow beyond the fire, in what was an area full of meadow buttercups, is now that of greater bird's-foot trefoil. As the buttercups lost their petals and began to make seed the trefoil flowers began to open so we have had weeks and weeks of yellow meadowy lawn down in this bottom part of the garden.

A yay! for a weed

Boggy Brae blogspot has been quiet for a while, not least because of computer sluggishness. The old MacBookPro has now died. Last time I looked there was no blogger.com app. Now there is one and I'm testing it.

Today, for the first time, in spite of the plant being present in various places on Boggy Brae for several years, rosebay willowherb has produced a flower. It seems that the marguerite patch in which it was growing has protected it from deer munchings. The garden has several other willowherbs: broad-leaved, great, marsh and square-stalked as well as Upland Enchanter's Nightshade and New Zealand Willowherb. I like them all, not least for their dance-like seed chucking abandon.

Till today the plants tended to look like this:

Today I found this:

Yay!

Down by the shore road there are field banks of this 'fire weed'. I love it.

A quick Boggy Brae garden wildflower check, 24 & 25 May

Yellow Pimpernel

Germander Speedwell

Ribwort Plantain

Pignut

Cuckoo Flower

Vinca major

Daisies

Bugle

Sweet vernal grass

Bluebells

Black sedge

Welsh poppies

Tormentil

Cowberry flowers

Changing forgetmenot

Beach at Mount Stuart, Bute

There is not much sand on our nearest bit of sea loch beach so finding a sandy beach is a joy. This is on the west side of the Clyde Estuary. not far from us as the crow flies but actually quite a long drive by road.

Looking north(ish)

If you enlarge the northward pic you might be able to make out, very faintly, Ben Lomond just above the headland on the left. To the right of that are what we think of as "our hills", the ones north of Glen Fruin that we can see from our house.







My favourite rock. Nearly brought the wee one home!

Red Campion. Boggybrae's is nowhere near flowering yet.
#nanoclimate!

Danish Scurvy-grass and looking east across the Clyde Estuary
to Largs and Great Cumbrae

Last time we attempted to visit Mount Stuart, when Toadlet's Spanish exchange partner was visiting, it was a perishing, wind-chilled day in March, and the place was closed even though its website said it was open. As a result, when Toad contacted them about that, they gave us free tickets for a booked visit. Yesterday was it.