Green spears of new growth are starting to push through the earth, Camassia, Daffodil and Snowdrop are starting to show. In the race to flower Snowdrops will be the clear winner but a while yet before they carpet the ground white. Daffodils come next, Tete a Tete then Thalia and finally Pheasants eye, the latter flowering well into May.
The past week was wet and sometimes wild, gales and rain and monochrome skies. The coming week is more settled, high pressure in charge. Light winds and sunshine, a chance to catch up with outdoor jobs.
Young trees recently planted among rough grass and heather low down on the moor will need to be checked for wind rock. Most are Red Alder, our pioneer tree, happy on the poorest of soils. Three years ago high on the moor on a spot where soil was eroding due to our sometimes almost biblical rain I planted a group of Red Alder. The peaty topsoil had washed away leaving shaley bedrock, the ground so hard that planting holes were made with an iron bar. I checked on them a few months ago, lashed by gales from every side, without stakes or shelter. They were thriving, chest high and thick stemmed.
New trees at the top of the meadow will also be checked. An L shape of Red and Italian Alder giving shelter to an infill of Rowan and Whitebeam with Amelanchier Canadensis that, gales permitting, might give a brief show of Autumn colour. At the front of the copse, facing South-east, a few dozen gorse went in. The vanilla scent of the flowers bringing back memories of an East Yorkshire childhood, a Delf full of Gorse and Linnets nests lined with horsehair.
A male Hen Harrier was seen hunting the shore. A grey ghost of a bird floating a few feet above the low cliff, almost lost in the half light of dawn. Common Dolphins came into the bay, a pod of three coming close to the shore, the sound of blowhole breaths carrying across the water.
A garden in Orkney 
Amazing colour contrasts. You can keep your Carribean blue and washed out Italian Mediterranean. I remember moving to Aberdeen on the 5th January in the year of the first Gulf War. Seemingly permanent twilight took a bit of getting used to but summer was incredible.
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It’s wonderful. I’ve pinned you! Lots of love from BTL, the G.
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Thank you Margot.
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Happy New Year Chippy/Gary.
I’ll be reading regularly. Love your photography.
Girders/Graeme from BTL/North Leeds.
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Happy new year to you Graeme. Thank you for your kind comment.
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You’re so right about Red Alder and the Pacific North West! It’s ubiquitous here all the way down the coast and up as far as Alaska.
I’m off on the Coast Starlight train all the way to southern California this week. Hoping that now the drought in that state has begun to abate the ones that died will have been replaced by some saplings. It’s one of my favourite trees, because of the beautiful white bark and the red-brown to orange-yellow colours I can dye using the wood. I even have some earrings that are discs of its bark, made by the local Sḵwx̱wú7mesh nation.
Great blog, can’t wait to see the next pictures and read what what’s growing.
Penny (vancouverite)
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Hello Penny, I think for Orkney they will turn out to the perfect tree, incredibly tough and fast growing with the added ability to fix their own nitrogen, a huge bonus on our poor soil. We had a rare summer drought here a couple of years ago and thought we had lost thirty or forty young trees that were way out of reach of a hose. The following spring every tree grew back from the roots, I wonder if the older trees in California might do the same. Up on the moor we plan to use them as nursery trees that will give shelter to slower growing Rowan and Downy Birch. I read that another native indian use was to make a dye for fishing nets to make the net less visible underwater. Lovely to hear from you. Enjoy the trip.
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Hi, Vancouverite/Penny!
Hi, Gary!
aeausa from btl here—so glad to see this site!
Happy New Year from stormy New England! In the last couple of days we’ve had a humungous dump of pelleted rain that froze solid followed by about eight inches of fluffy white stuff. The shoveling was a bear—the fluffy stuff was so deceptive, with icy concrete lurking underneath. The accumulation on my car roof was like a large, slow-moving ice floe when I finally persuaded it to slide over the edge. We are now in a three-inch deluge of rain that will wash the snow away, but that much snow pack plus that much rain in such a short time will surely lead to localised flooding, and the very high winds and gusts predicted for tomorrow as the storm pulls away is a whole ‘nuther act in this weather show: my electricity is flickering.
Penny, my daughter lives in Bellingham, WA with her brood, so I see the PNW occasionally. However, I envy you the trip to Southern California. They used to live below LAX in El Segundo which is a neat “pocket” small town on the edge of a megalopolis. Just at the moment El S is giving spring pollen alerts and I’m most envious!:)
Re Orkney: I am in awe of the stonework, the plants, the prose. Gary, I have so admired how every week you are so faithful to your recording of your garden and projects: it is truly a classic journal, and I do hope you publish it some day. …As a book!
My garden life is about to change because I am going to move from here in the next six months or so. Can’t bear to leave my plants or the many rocks collected off the coast of Maine, so have moved the rocks to a “staging” area near where I may live, and the plants will go there next in a “big dig” in the spring.
Where I will eventually live is a total mystery and a frightening prospect because buying here is like buying in central London; that is, impossible. However, I am bound and determined to get my fingers in the dirt before the summer is out, even if it’s new dirt for me. That is most definitely a “to be continued…”
Meanwhile, I have learned so much from Allan Jenkins and the btls, but your comments (and now, photos!) are just plain brilliant and may keep me going while I say goodbye to one garden and hope to find another.
We came to a house that was a “fixer-upper” with concrete and asphalt where a small lawn and garden should be, and spent two long summers getting rid of the asphalt and concrete and digging down a foot and a half to get to a depth where we could bring in tons of soil and all the amendments needed to help growing things flourish.
Seaweed came from the nearby coast, rocks came from an island off Maine, and the first flowers and veggies were the hit-or-miss of new gardeners, often donated from old-timers who very kindly let us get on with things and make our own mistakes:).
Now I know every blade of grass and have finally, after thirty-five years, kinda-sorta figured out where things go, and can find my way anywhere around here barefoot in the dark. And suddenly it’s time to leave, with that dratted thing called “prudence” making the decision—at 75 you may be able shovel after a big snowstorm and dig to do plantings, but in five years, maybe not so on to something smaller…the years of building here have suddenly closed . It’s quite painful, but if my rocks and plants can take up residence with me, it will be all right.
I’ll miss the western sky and one great sycamore maple that I turn my face to and sing a little goodbye-to-the-day sunset song I made up for the children at the end of our barefoot playtime—but with any luck I’ll be headed homeward to the area I grew up in, where I also know all the barefoot grass places, and have a favorite western sky and row of trees that have been there since my own childhood.
So x fingers, it won’t be an uprooting so much as a transplanting: hope it takes! Thanks so much for this, and for Orkney. It gives such hope that radical moves can become flourishing enterprises!
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Hi, it’s nice to hear from you, after reading about your weather you make Orkney sound tropical :-). I hope the garden move goes well, although we knew we wanted to move to Orkney we had a similar dilemma, leaving our old garden of twenty-eight years where like you we knew every plant and blade of grass for an unknown garden in a totally different growing climate. Once we had moved though we never looked back with regret, I think the challenge of a new space with new ideas takes over. We have since moved again but once more to a garden smaller than the one we left in Yorkshire, this home gives space to make a meadow and to plant trees but we had no desire for a larger garden. Take your favourite plants and happy memories. You mention flickering lights – by coincidence our power went off today for seven hours, fortunately a rare thing, a repair crew straight over on the first available ferry. Best wishes and good luck with the move.
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Your garden and the landscape look fabulous in that cold bleak weather. No snow way down South but very cold for us soft Southerners. Two times a morning defrosting bird bath cold!
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It’s so hard to leave a garden, but hopefully it will be a chance for you to create something smaller, for sure, but equally lovely and treasured. Hugs tuity/Margot
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