Before a rear garden could be started we needed to give it shelter. Something to filter 60mph summer curve ball gales. As mentioned in a previous post we inherited a few trees, the oldest are two coppiced sycamores at the western edge of what would become the garden. There’s also a younger purple leaved sycamore that lives up to its name only in spring, leaves that unfurl a warm purple bronze turning green by mid-summer. To the north there’s a small group of conifers, larch and sitka spruce, tucked among them a spindly and very out of place for here horse chestnut, perhaps bought as a sapling further south and brought home, perhaps grown from a conker slipped into a holiday pocket. An old rowan also sits on the edge of what is now the rear garden. A testament to stubborn survival, the first eight feet of its gale blown trunk lies horizontally along the ground, over the years new growth has sprung from it to give a multi-stemmed tree. Almost as wide as it is tall, branches thick with moss and lichen.
The old adage is that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, for Orkney probably forty. We needed something that would grow quickly, filling the gaps that allowed winds to race in off the moor unhindered. We’d settled on a grey leaved willow, salix hookeriana, a native of the west coast of America. Although it grows well in Orkney, and like most willows strikes easily from cuttings, a downer is that once it reaches a height it has a habit of snapping in the wind. We would have to plant them in rows like redcoats waiting for battle, coppicing each row on a staggered cycle before the wind did it for us.
A visit to a Mainland nursery turned this on its head. We got chatting to the owner who took us to the edge of his just as exposed as ours garden, he pointed out a tall Red Alder and asked for a guess of its age-15/20 years?. The answer was seven, he had two hundred spare, end of season, eighteen inches tall and a £1 each, “how many did we want?” We managed to fit all two hundred in the car.
As they grow they bring more life to the garden. In the leaf litter Foxgloves and Celandines turned up unbidden. Bird sown brambles weave among them. Wild garlic, cadged from a garden across the bay, is slowly spreading. In autumn Siskins hang like acrobats from ripe cones, this week a group of Long tailed tits, a volery, flitted among them.
The old Rowan now wrapped on three sides by sheltering Alders is putting on new growth, heavy with berries in autumn. Each spring, in the leaf litter below it, a gift of dozens of thumb high seedlings. Potted on for a year or two before going out to new homes, tucked low among the heathers up on the hill. If lucky they’ll dodge the gales and Mountain Hares and decades from now their branches will also hang thick with moss and lichen.
A garden in Orkney 