The past couple of weeks have brought a mix of days, some gave bursts of heavy stair-rod rain and others gifted bright and cloudless skies. Today it’s grey and flat calm, barely a ripple on the bay.
The one common denominator has been warmth, add in the spells of rain plus our current nineteen hours of daylight and the result is perfect growing weather. Jacqui is on a “painting the Forth Bridge” task, working her way through the garden, secateurs and string in hand for cutting back and tying in wayward perennials, at her feet a trug that in no time at all fills with weed seedlings. It seems in Orkney at least, this is a weed, and a snail, year. The snails get off lightly, collected up and thrown into the meadow, ditto the finger length black slugs that seem to lurk under every plant pot.
In the past I’ve mentioned the guerrilla garden, a vaguely deeded no-mans land strip of roadside verge that is part ours, part county councils. A home for spare plants and cuttings that has almost become an extension of the garden. A long narrow border that runs the length of the front garden stone dykes. It has had a narrow escape, the island is getting fibre broadband, a replacement for the aged copper wire that an engineer once cheerfully told me was about as useful as ‘wet string’. Fortunately the diggers laying the pipes for the cable went along the other side of the road, had they not, there would have been frantic days of lifting and subsequent replanting.
An on and off project for the past few weeks has been the digging of a new pond. When we started a garden here it was as much for wildlife as it was for humans, and the one thing that was always missed, was a pond. Three were dug in the meadow and they’ve proved to be a magnet for wildlife but the meadow was easy, ask kevin, the owner driver of an excavator working along the way, to trundle his machine across and a few hours later you have ponds. In the garden it’s more awkward, there’s shallow soil atop sandstone and a sloping site to contend with, both of which always put us off. In the end we girded our loins, gave up a front garden bed and dug two ponds, the soil as expected was shallow, in places barely a foot down before you hit solid stone. To cope with the slope the lowest side of the bigger pond was raised up with dug out spoil. Both were too shallow to backfill with soil, so each has been lined with sea-smoothed flat stones from the shore. A system is in place to fill them with rainwater from the house roof.
A pump has been added and a blade waterfall was priced up, two to three hundred pounds depending if copper or corten steel – Ow Much!! I bought one made of thick ABS plastic – twenty quid, and covered the visible bits with a piece copper picked up from a farm dump. Apart from the copper, which is nicely aged 🙂, it’s all a bit new at the moment but time and planting will take off the shininess. A few evenings ago a Frog was spotted sitting on a cobble, entering the water with a plop when I got too close, that single moment made it worth the effort.
In the meadow it feels like mother nature is holding her breath, so many plants are on the cusp of flowering, we’re still waiting for the day, when suddenly one morning, you look across and there’s a sea of flower heads, nodding to the beat of the wind. There are a few early starters, damp loving ragged robin and water avens are open, in drier spots the first ox-eyes are unfurling, turning bright yellow faces to the sun.
Wickedly spiked marsh thistles (pictured top) are also bursting open, capping their urn-like flower buds with starbursts of vivid pink. They’re a mixed blessing, great for bees and pollinators but very invasive. The only upside of their invasiveness is that for the first year they form a floret, flowering only in the second year. It’s an easy enough task, to slow their plans of field, if not world domination, to wander round now and then with an aptly named thistle spear, cutting the florets root at its base.
Below the meadow harbour seals are giving birth, we tend to leave them be, avoiding disturbing both pups and mothers for a few weeks, but can’t resist a quiet peek now and then. Hot days at low tide are best, when all, young and old, snooze the day away on a thin mattress of bladderwrack.
A garden in Orkney 