May the 26th.

May, so far, has become a month of mists. At the moment haars are seemingly ever present, sometimes so thick they steal the view beyond the garden dykes. The linked  island of South walls, a mere mile or so across the bay, appearing and disappearing as the fogs ebb and flow. On other days they lurk in low banks in the Offing, the point on the sea where the view is lost over the horizon. Whether near or far they are always localised, occasionally, with bright blue skies above us, we’ll still hear the low rolling boom of a distant foghorn.

The garden of course doesn’t care. It’s warm and mild with long hours of daylight. Winter has passed and from a plants point of view there’s work to be done, flowers to open and seed to be set before the end of our short summer. It’s hard to keep up now, each day brings more colour and growth. We noticed yesterday afternoon that alliums had opened, seemingly within hours, sure that in the morning the buds were still tight.

A favourite plant that has just come into flower is valeriana pyrenaica. Bought a few years ago on a visit to a Yorkshire lavender farm. We had seen it in a border near the farm cafe but the onsite nursery proved to be bare. We struck lucky, the lady running the nursery went on a search and a single plant was found. We brought it home to try in Orkney and it has thrived, split and re-split every autumn it’s now dotted throughout the garden. A tall tough as old boots bee magnet that needs little if any staking and is happy in sun or part shade. Definitely a keeper.

In a shady border, most of our Hostas are up and in full leaf. They share the space with a white form of the spanish bluebell, perhaps not a good plant to have if you already have native bluebells as they hybridise easily but we inherited them and the spanish variety is already common here. In the sycamore woodlands of a grand house along the way, once the lairds pile, the ground at this time of year is carpeted with both the blue and white forms.

On and off through May, we’ve been adding more plugs to the wildflower meadow. On a warm day it’s an enjoyable job but what you mustn’t do is count the cell trays before you start. This month we’ve planted out 78 x 40 cell trays, over 3000 plugs. To count them all beforehand would be akin to painting the Forth Bridge, a task that would seem to have no end. To buy them in would be financially impossible, but from seed sown in home made cold frames, the price per plug, less your time, is a few pence. They were a mix of species, for wet spots ragged robin and water avens, for drier areas ox-eye daisy, yarrow and lesser knapweed along with a half dozen others. All of them are plants that should have been here but aren’t, lost when the meadow slowly re-wilded itself to an almost monoculture 0f rush.

At the very bottom of the meadow, just before the land falls steeply to the shore, there’s an area of ground that never dries out. It’s the spot where we’ve added wildlife ponds. The areas between the ponds are thick with rush. We tried, in the first year of making the meadow, to mow the rush down and thus spent an afternoon digging our old diesel power scythe out of the mud. Since then the area has been planted as a small coppice of willow. We used a grey leaved variety that does well in Orkney, salix hookeriana, the dune willow, a native of western North America. Two feet long broomstick thick cuttings, from a friends garden along the road, were  pushed with ease into the soft ground. In the first year they stood still but  in year two they came to life, growing rapidly and leaving the rushes behind. They’re salt hardy but brittle. In time we’ll coppice them, before the wind does it for us.