May the 19th.

Our spell of dry weather is continuing. May so far has brought barely a drop of rain. Most days have been sunny, those that haven’t came without threat of even the lightest of showers. A  camera I owned as a child had an exposure setting of ‘cloudy bright’, a perfect description for those rare days when Sol has hidden his face. Despite the sunshine what we haven’t had are many haars, thick sea fogs that usually roll in like clockwork after a couple of days of warmth, so far, for May, just the one. The island of South Walls, just across the bay and linked to Hoy by a now permanent causeway, drifted in and out of focus as the haar thickened and thinned, eventually coming second to the sun, burning off in the heat of the day.

Although there are still a lot of plants that have yet to come into flower, it feels as if the front gardens especially, are on speed. With an occasional evening watering you can almost hear the plants growing. As others grow, a sweet cicely, myrrhis odorata , a gift from a garden on South Walls, is already fading, rushing to set seed before summers end.

A front, and to be fair, back garden favourite, is the Capons tail grass, valeriana pyrenaica, despite our coastal aspect and often wild climate, it shrugs off salt laden summer gales and despite its height, needs minimal staking. It also looks nothing like a grass. One of those “will it grow here” plants that came from much softer climes, a plant stall on a lavender farm, that has proved to be bomb proof. 

Another front garden good doer is the Leopard plant, ligularia othello, grown just as much for its large greeny-bronze leaves as it is for its late summer flowers. Unlike its hosta companion it suffers the occasional slug bite. Why our hostas, which down in Yorkshire often looked like lace curtains, are now ignored by slugs up here, is still a bit of a very welcome mystery.

If a camera is to hand, a bulb that can’t be walked past without a photograph being taken, is the allium. A close relative of the onion and a bumblebee magnet. They’re a great cottage, or in our case, croft garden favourite, taking up minimum space and giving maximum impact. The books say they need a dry and well drained soil and in a normal year our soil is anything but that. Despite this they thrive and spread and clearly like it here. It’s a good thing that plants can’t read.

They say a garden is never finished and we’ve certainly got a few yet to start projects. Money is always tight and even if it wasn’t there’s a real pleasure in up-cycling or reusing. Our favourite shop is the shore, a place to find the ‘pennies’ (top stones) for dykes, sea worn slabs for stepping-stone paths and driftwood for fences. In winter past, a back garden slope that really needed a few steps, finally got them. As is usually the case, no expense was spent, the steps are old fence stabs, rescued from a steep sided geo, the supports are angle iron from an old bed frame that I found when we first cleared the garden with a mini digger. I can lay out the bones, construct a skeleton of drystone dykes and paths, but Jacqui is the one that adds the flesh and gives the garden life and love. A half year on, the steps with J’s planting and attention, look like they’ve been there for years.

In summer the best times of day here are either early morning or late evening. The light is angled, flowers and foliage are backlit, details are revealed that are lost to a harsh midday sun. On a morning, when the birds are just awakening, there’s the call of a cuckoo and the pleep of Oystercatchers starting to go about their business. In contrast, on an evening there’s a growing silence, a settling down, the sun dipping low, the light filtered by the trees before being lost to the hills to the west. It’s a close call but at this time of year at least, evening light just wins out.

We’re rapidly approaching the longest day, we’re in the ‘simmer dim’, a time when the sun will barely dip below the horizon before quickly rising again. There isn’t really a darkness to the night now, just a few hours of twilight. At this time of year, before you hit the sack, the last thing to do is walk around the garden or down to the shore, it’s a magical time. It’s also the time of year when we say goodbye to the the mirrie dancers, the northern lights. An app still pings of strong displays but they’re lost now to the twilight. More than once this past couple of weeks, when you got your eye in, there has been the softest of green glows to the North, like the faint street lights of some faraway town hidden way over the horizon. We’ll see them again in winter, at a  time where the sun rises and sets within six or seven hours. Days that at the moment, with our seemingly endless summer, feel like they’re a million miles away.