The last days of September are sticking to the script. Following the pattern of previous weeks. The odd haar, the occasional spell of rain, but generally dry and bright. Sunshine and showers. What the past week has brought though is a sharp edge to the wind and, on still days, a real nip to the morning air. We’re into fleece and body warmer days.
From the rear garden, the moor can be seen again. Shelter belt trees are losing their leaves. At the moment the view through the trees is patchy, like looking out through the window of a long abandoned croft house, tattered and torn lace curtains and dirty glass. The Alders will shed their leaves first, already falling, crisped and browned. Sycamores and Rowans will cling to their green modesty for a few more weeks. Sycamore keys are hung in bunches, waiting for a gale to set them free. In Spring they’ll germinate in borders by the hundred, growing as thick as grass.
Hesperantha coccinea has come into its own this week. The books tell us that they need shelter and don’t like the wind, regardless of that, they thrive here. By November they’ll be the last plant standing. Another good doer, that we never tire of looking at, is Rudbeckia goldsturm, we plant them close to the house, a splash of sunlight on a rainy day.
Late Summer flowering Aster, little carlow, is proving to be a bee and hoverfly magnet. It’s quite tall and leggy and in its exposed front garden location has to be discretely wired to a fence. Bought from an online nursery in a 9cm pot it has grown at a rate of knots, clearly a keeper.
Other plants of course are fading, done for the year. Two favourites, whose full names are lost to the mists of time, are a compact purple flowering geranium, whose leaves at this time of year give a show of reds and yellows, and a leucanthemum, a gift from a garden a few miles away. The leucanthemum has flowered through August and is only now starting to fade, shedding its petals to the wind. As with all plants that are gifts, even if we found out the name tomorrow, it would always be “the one from Leslye’s garden”.
After a few weeks of quiet, Starlings have returned. Most are juveniles, moulting into adulthood. An odd mix of spangled bodies and dull brown heads, the moult into adulthood must start from the bottom up. They arrive en masse and spend as much time squabbling as they do eating, a brief peace for a communal bath before returning to the feeders for fisticuffs. As a child they were Sheppies, a corruption of their old name of Sheepstare. The stare is believed by many to have given the Starling its name, from the white speckled starry plumage of its breast.
An on-off summer project has been the building of dry-stone dykes to create a small courtyard garden. The best stone here came from a long ago closed island quarry, varying in thickness but flat and easy to lay. The worst comes off the hill, rubble with no ‘face’ or flats, fit only for farm tracks. After rebuilding front garden dykes we were down to the dregs of our of quarried stone, and so have had to use both. The inner face, seen from the garden, is a match for the rest of the dykes, quarried stone, a continuity of colour and shape. The outer face is whatever we had, rubble from the hill and stone dug from the ground while making the garden. It’s awkward and slow to build with. I once built a rubble-stone dyke around a half acre plot at the North end of the island, it took weeks and I said never again, but beggars can’t be choosers and so the walls, after a Summer of an hour here, and two hours there, are up, awaiting their pennies.
The pennies are the upright top stones. There’s a spot a few miles away, where the stone is just right, accessible by a barely passable track. In days past the place where fishermen would collect flat stones to act as weights for wooden creels. I went a few days ago, planning to visit a nearby geo with a camera before filling the van with suitable stone. It’s dark here now by 7.30 and I’d left it too late, managing the single photograph below before realising that if I didn’t get a scoot on I’d be searching for stone in the dark. All went well until I attempted to turn round at the end of the track. A crack like a pistol shot and a loss of power steering. I googled the part when I got home, one third of the value of the van. The next day I took it to the islands mend anything man, a couple of hours later as good as new, in the sense that a sixteen year old, moon and back mileage van, can be ‘new’. The necessary part fashioned with heat and a hammer from a pipe taken from a long dead tractor.
It has been a good month for the mirrie dancers. At the moment on a clear night it’s rare to look to the North and not see at least a hint of green. The aurora giving the impression that just beyond the hill there’s a town or city whose streetlights are glowing green, lighting up the atmosphere. Just after midnight on Wednesday, the dancers put on a show of pinks, reds and greens that lasted an hour, only brought to a close by the arrival of low cloud and rain.
A garden in Orkney 
I so look forward to your blog. Gary. I sit with my morning coffee looking out at my huge beech trees and enjoy your garden and Island.
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Hi Tracy, good to hear from you, Jacqui sends her love. We’re jealous of those big Beech trees, I bet they look stunning. Have a good week.
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Fantastic stuff Chippy! You are so lucky to enjoy the aurora – it’s definitely a bucket-list thing for me. I discovered a stray clump of Hesperantha earlier in the season. A couple of summers back I had clumps of it everywhere but it just didn’t seem to work among the border in the way that I hoped so I grubbed it all up. I so I thought. I’ve been letting it get more established throughout the year with a view to it moving into the pink border.
Starlings are a rarity here – although quite frequent elsewhere in the locality. Occasionally we get a gang of them on the power line but they never linger. Looks as though it’s been a bountiful year for robins and blackbirds, and they’re busy fighting over the purple berries on the Lonicera nitida.
Have a good week!
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Morning Andrew, for some reason this had gone to spam, not sure why as your comment last week didn’t, nor did your later reply, the same happened to me on your site, first post disappeared, second was fine.
A bit of an indian summer in this neck of the woods, Tee shirt weather today with a good forecast until at least next Thursday. Jacqui is cutting back and splitting perennials, I’m trying to work out where we can fit another two sets of ground mounted solar panels, normally you just point them South and that’s what we have done with the first two rows but we get such big skies here that I think a set facing South East and another set to the South West will probably give a bigger bite of the cherry, especially in Summer.
The hesperantha’s, along with hemerocallis, look almost too exotic for this neck of the woods but they’re such tough plants, I think hesperantha is like crocosmia, you think you have dug it up until it reappears in the same spot the following year.
Lots of Starlings here, I think probably because there’s lots of pasture and livestock. One of my favourite birds. We’ve got resident Robins but summer visiting Blackbirds have left for the year, in a few weeks we’ll get an influx of what I think must be Scandinavian birds as they arrive at pretty much the same time as Redwings.
Have a good week.
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Hi Gary, Trying a different method of reply today -email! Fabulous photos especially the last and I love starlings too. We get fabulous murmurations down here, I’m not too far from the Somerset levels, but in the town centre a smallish group of starlings have taken a fancy to one special tree in an old church yard. Standing close and listening to them squabble and jostle for prime position is brilliant! The ones that arrive first are pushed further and further down the tree, to much indignant squawking! Big winds and rain coming so have done some much needed pruning. One year earlier than this, my runner beans went over! My beautiful clematis tangutica had to have a hair cut too, it’s so vigorous, if left it might bring the trellis down. . I love it, still in flower but also with those wonderful fluffy seed heads that sparrows love. Have a good week and best wishes to you and Jacqui. Margot.
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Hello Margot, our Starling murmurations tend to be best over the cliffs, with not too many big stands of trees the Starlings head to the steepest geo’s, hunkering down for the night among tussocky grass on sometimes near vertical faces. They make me smile, I love the way that they clearly need each other’s companionship but still still can’t help squabbling at the drop of a hat.
When we lived further South I spent a lot of time in the Somerset levels, it’s a very beautiful area.
We’ve got an indian summer at the moment, bright and settled with more to come, set fair until Thursday. It won’t last of course, the year is definitely turning. Jacqui is also busy cutting back and deadheading. If Jacqui doesn’t do it the inevitable gales will. We’ve tried a clematis montana up here, it’s alive and climbing up a sycamore, early days but it is doing ok. I envy your tangutica, beautiful in flower and in seed.
Best wishes.
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Hi! Sent an email, but hoping this’ll work too this time! Like to interact with other people from G too.
Cheers, Margot
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Hi Gary and all. I’m late to your blog as I’m still not used to Friday being the new Sunday where the Guardian’s gardening column is concerned. Went to put some replies up BTL at 7am this morning and found they’d closed the comments.
Hesperantha is something that I’ve had in the garden here twice, not planted by me, but as it appeared along a fence, I assume it was a gift from the birds. Had one the same colour as yours and a paler pink one. They grew to clumps about 14cm across that suddenly one winter were gone. Ah well, easy come easy go…..
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Morning Penny, the same here, I missed what I think was the first Friday column altogether, only remembered the second one on Sunday with comments already spread over three days, not the same. Hopefully we’ll all get used to tuning in on a Friday, I’m missing plot 29.
The hesperantha’s look way too tender for this neck of the woods at this time of year, tough as old boots though, we’ve had them flower as late as November.
Odd how plants suddenly turn up, there’s a single teasel at the edge of some trees at the top of the meadow, bird sown, wind sown, already lurking in the soil, we’ll never know. There are none that I know of locally, crossing fingers that it self sows and spreads.
Have a good week.
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Gosh Gary, you must’ve had mighty winds. Do hope you and Jacqui are OK.
Margot x
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Hi Margot, thank you for thinking of us. Surprisingly, so far, we haven’t had it too bad, a few hours of pretty normal for here 70 mph Easterly gusts this morning but by mid day the winds were down to next to nothing, perhaps by then we were in the eye of the storm. Our inter-island ferry was cancelled this morning but ran as normal this afternoon.
They will pick up again tonight as they swing from East to West and are forecast to reach 90mph locally at midnight but, I’m tempting fate here, Westerlies tend to pass us by, we’re in the lee of a hill and usually they’re the least damaging. Fingers crossed!
x
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Good to hear you are OK. Fingers crossed indeed. Margot x
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