Unlike many parts of the UK, where much of August remained stubbornly dry and unseasonably warm, Orkney has had its usual mixed bag of weather. We had more than our share of rain but clearing clouds often gave a silver lining – sharp crystal clear days where the garden looked so green you felt you could graze on it and then cut the air with a knife.
August also brings softer days, days where the light lays pale and grey over a silent land and sea. With the Autumn equinox already behind us the softer days are the tell that for us summer is over.
While I spent most of the month working with friends on their new build Jacqui has been busy working her way around the garden, cutting back spent foliage and topping the damp ground with a mix of well rotted compost and leaf mould. In a shady spot beneath two sycamores, as the ground is being fed Astilbes and Hostas are being split, another sure sign that Autumn is upon us.
Despite the cutting back there’s still plenty more for the garden to give, at the moment the colours, like the light, are predominantly soft, a mix of pinks and blues dotted here and there with creams and yellows. In a front garden a couple of favourite pinks grow side by side, the spires of veronicastrum pink glow and the mallow-like blooms of Sidalcea elsie heugh.
The current exception to the soft colours rule is Crocosmia Lucifer, we grow a lot of crocosmia’s here and when it comes to flowering Lucifer is always the first out of the blocks. A furnace-red flower with a sun yellow stem that glows in both light or shade. As a genus they hail from the hot grasslands of Africa and despite this they thrive in our cool damp soil.
The upside of Augusts rain is that it kept the new garden ponds, dug a few weeks ago, topped up. A Heath Robinson set up that feeds the largest pond with rain from the house roof via a buried scaffold pipe, has so far worked a treat, the smaller lower pond, out of view in the photo, gets fed from the upper ponds overflow. We’ve added native water lilies and irises together with oxygenators and although the water is still pea-soupy with algae it’s slowly but surely clearing.
The effort of digging both out by hand and collecting what must have been a good few tons of cobbles to line them was worth it. Frogs have been seen and the hope is that both they and the Toads that lurk beneath garden hostas will spawn here next year. The first arrivals, literally within days, were whirligigs and pond skaters, I didn’t realise, until I accidentally caught it on camera, that the former are prey for the latter. No wonder they move so fast.
At this time of year, in the meadow that we made, the dominant colour is yellow, ox-eyes have just about finished for the year and pale blue devils-bit scabious have yet to open. Give it a few more weeks and most of the meadow will be seed heads. The carpet of yellow, courtesy of Cats-ear, a Hawkbit, is the meadows swan song.
On warm sunny days aptly named Meadow brown butterflies are seen, skittish fliers that rarely settle for more than a second or two. Eggs are laid on grasses, or sometimes just dropped while the butterfly is in flight. Within two or three weeks the caterpillars will hatch and spend the winter in semi-hibernation, emerging to feed whenever a rise in temperature wakes them from their slumber.
At the bottom of the meadow, just before the land falls to the shore, the ponds that were dug there, via the easy route of an excavator, are a few years in front of the ponds in the garden. This year, for the first time, one of the three had frogspawn. Offcuts of native plants, sourced from a flooded peat cut up on the moor, are slowly establishing. A favourite is Bogbean, a plant whose roots, if you had the urge, can be ground into flour. Its bright green leaves, that stand proud of the water, are a favourite spot for courting Damselflies who literally do hook up to mate.
A garden in Orkney 