July the 12th.

After June’s bumper crop of sunshine, July has brought a bit of a reset, grey and occasionally very wet, at one point last week it rained nonstop for 48 hours, a truly biblical downpour that saw low cloud cling to the land like thick grey smoke. Next week though it’s all change again, to quote the late, great Caroline Aherne, it will allegedly be “Scorchio”, a high pressure weather system is promising settled days and bright skies.

Although it should be said that scorchio in this neck of the woods is around 18 degrees C.

With rain forecast for pretty much every day through early July, we grabbed the opportunity to plant more trees. Hoy can lay claim to having the uk’s most northerly ancient woodland, it lies close to Rackwick at the north end of the island and is a remnant of the scrubby woodlands that would once have covered much of Orkney. A mix, among others, of  Rowan, Downy birch, Aspen, and Willow. I’d managed to lay my hands on trees grown from Berriedale’s native stock, and it was these that we planted. They’re available in very limited quantities and for the edge of the meadow between house and sea, I had a grand total of six Aspens and a dozen Downy birch. The aspens especially are hard to get, they rarely set seed in Orkney and spread by suckering from the parent plant, the downy birch are easier but there’s rightly a limit to how much seed is collected each year. The very salt tolerant aspens went the closest to the sea, near a pond that we dug a few years ago. The birch went halfway between house and shore, in a spot dotted yellow with the flowers of Cats-ear and Tormentil.

I also had a good number of Rowans, a mix of both Berriedale stock and trees grown from seed collected in a remote valley, a wild and beautiful spot that is overlooked by Ward Hill, the highest point in Orkney. Planting the aspens and birch was easy, not so the rowans, they were destined for the patch of moor that rises away behind the garden. There’s no path, nor would I want to make one, so you load up the barrow, push it as far as you can get and then load up a plastic shellfish basket salvaged from the shore and walk, or rather stumble, your way up the slope, dropping to your knees every now and then when your foot catches a hidden snick, a narrow channel, formed by rainwater rushing from moor to sea. 

The ground is terrible, in places stone with a hint of soil, so before planting goes ahead you walk the area with a length of sharpened rebar in hand, if it can be pushed in more than a foot, mark the spot with a cane and carry on. In the end I planted sixty-six rowans, keeping track of where I had been by topping each cane with a now empty plant pot. The pots were collected but the canes will stay, with the rowans barely peeping above the wind cropped heathers, the canes, for a year or two at least, will be a helpful guide to where I have actually planted them.

After planting the rowans I went for a walk to the old peat cuts, go over the boundary fence and after a few hundred yards you’re amongst  them. They’re silent now, reclaimed by nature, if it wasn’t for the wide sunken areas, some many multiple tennis courts in size – the ‘cuts’ left behind when the peat was taken for fuel, you would have no idea that generations of men and women had spent countless Summers there, cutting earth for their hearths.

A bird that is ubiquitous up on the moors is the bonxie, the Great skua. The size of a herring gull on steroids they’re a bird seemingly made for aggression, not quite gull, not quite bird of prey. They  take on all comers, up to and including fully grown Greylag geese. As I walked through the cuts a pair watched from a favourite vantage point, a spot that like the peat cutters, may go back many generations, a small bump of green where the heathers grow brighter, enriched by a build up of the birds guano.

It was inevitable that the birds would take umbrage at my presence and sure enough they couldn’t help themselves, one coming in at knee height, the other preferring an in your face bluff, veering away at the last second, passing your shoulder with a whoosh of wings. This went on for a few hundred yards, they had no nests or young to defend, just bonxies being bonxies.

Back in the garden, another upside of the rain is that Hosta’s are suddenly playing centre stage. They’re a plant that does well here, this year is seemingly a slug and snail year but despite that, for whatever reason, we have seen very little gastropod damage, a nibble here and there and that’s about it. The two hosta’s  in the picture are Halcyon and Sum & substance, little and large.

In the fight against slugs and snails we do have allies, frogs and toads and the occasional visiting hedgehog. The favourite allies of all though are Song thrushes, they arrive each Spring, building hidden nests delicately lined with mud and hatching youngsters from pale blue eggs that are the colour of a summer morning sky. For weeks the parents have been backwards and forwards, snails in beaks, now we’re seeing the youngsters, three yesterday, learning the ropes from their worn out parents.