Author: Gary Smith.

This weeks Six on Saturday is a wander around the garden and its environs – six different spaces. Our weather has been the usual mixed bag, some of the photographs were taken earlier in the month, on drier days than this, a few were taken this morning, with the rain coming down in stair rods. Our home is an ex croft that like pretty much every other house on the island comes with a small parcel of land, most of which is managed for wildlife. The garden is split 50/50, planted for humans and wildlife alike. At this time of year everything is winding down, trees are shedding leaves, flower heads are turning to seed but despite the rain and gales there’s still some colour to be seen.

First up is the verge-side guerrilla garden, it gets its tongue in cheek name from the fact that a good slice of it possibly belongs to the county council, it started life as somewhere to put spare plants and has since become a long border that runs the full length of the dry-stone dykes that we rebuilt in 2020, our covid lockdown project. For most of the year it’s a typical cottage garden mix but for Autumn, when most perennials start to fade, Jacqui has simplified the planting down to three main players, Rudbeckia goldsturm, Hesperantha coccinea and Reed canary grass. Summer plants aren’t lifted and a few geraniums and catmints still lurk among them but for this time of year the aim was three main species, chosen for both colour and wind hardiness.

Next we’ll go through the no expense spent driftwood gate and into two thirds of the front garden space. An awkward spot to layout, it didn’t just slope downwards but also sloped right to left. We got around this by terracing the ground to the left and then, to break the right to left slope, we split the space with a simple fence. As with the gate no expense was spent, the fence, like the gate, came from the shore. With the exception of the centre ground Centranthus ruber which seems pretty much gale proof, most of the planting is deliberately kept low, anything tall goes next to the dyke or the fence to be discreetly wired into place. The front garden carries on, following the line of the guerrilla garden and the house, when we rebuilt the dykes the last third of it was enclosed on all four sides with stone, a Kale yard, a nod to this wee houses history, the spot where veg would have been grown. When we first laid it out we made a large central bed with a border on its Southern edge, a few months ago we replaced the central bed with a couple of ponds, something that from a garden wildlife point of view had been sadly lacking. The ponds are young and still murky but they’re planted with native waterlilies and oxygenators and time will eventually clear them. Carry on South and beyond the stone dyke there’s a place between garden and moor that in Spring will be planted with phacelia and mustard, pollen for bees and winter seed heads for finches.

Leave the front gardens, turn the corner of the house and you’ll come to a space that like the ponds is another recent project, a small courtyard enclosed on three sides by stone dykes. The dykes were built with the last of our stone, we were down to the dregs and I had just enough to finish the walls but had to salvage the top stones, the upright “pennies”, from the shore. There’s a simple driftwood bench that one day, when I get around to cutting up a hot water tank, another shore find, will have a copper top. Quicker to dry than timber, no wet backside when you sit down. It’s a project that had been on hold for years, when we were renovating the house we dug the space out with a mini digger so that a concrete mixer could reverse up and pour a new floor, when the house was done we put it all back and built the dykes. It sits in a wind tunnel and has only recently been planted, some plants will thrive, others might struggle with the westerlies and easterlies that funnel through the narrow space between house and outbuildings – to be tweaked as time goes on.

Turn the corner again and you’re in the back garden, another space that because of the slope is better for being terraced. We inherited three Sycamores and topped up their shelter with Red alder, a tree that cleverly fixes its own nitrogen and even in this neck of the woods will grow, when young, by a metre a year. At this time of year the back garden is fading, it paces the trees that protect it from the westerlies that race in from the open moor, as they crisp to brown and shed their leaves, the garden dies back. Reds and soft yellows and marmalade orange, the autumn colours that the trees up here can’t give.

Turn on your heels and go back through the front garden gate and between garden and shore there’s the meadow, a long term project that has seen a duo-culture of Soft rush and Common bent turn into the meadow that decades ago, before it fell into disuse, it once would have been. Like the back garden it’s pretty much over for the year, the Yarrows in the foreground are the last man standing. When they have faded to seed I’ll walk a power scythe over it, raking up the hay and piling it near the shore so that beetles and bugs and Wood mice can bed down in it. When Spring comes, I’ll mow it until the end of April – the Soft rushes that dominated are still there of course but the mowing and cutting keeps them in check, allowing others the space to grow.

Go beyond the meadow, through the willow coppice mentioned last week and you’re down onto the shore, under ancient Udal law, a throwback to the days of the Norsemen, the shore here belongs not to the Crown but to the deed holder. In reality it belongs to the creatures who live there, the Eiders and the Fulmars, the Harbour Seals and others.

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Six on Saturday – 10/10/26

This weeks six on Saturday is a selection of birds. It’s a hard pick so I’ve gone for three whose company in the garden we cherish and three whose arrival we look forward to each Spring. All the birds in the photographs are fledglings, hatched this year either in the garden or on its margins, and one of the six, for Orkney at least, is a very rare bird indeed.

First up has to be the House sparrow. A bird that for centuries has lived alongside man. We saw none when we first started a garden here and this wee house, now renovated to modern regs standards, has no space for them, nowhere to hide nests beneath loose roof slates or facias. It didn’t take much though to bring them back, offcuts of ply were fashioned into des-res nest boxes and as they’re sociable birds, fastened in clusters to suitable trees, Sycamore cul-de-sacs for sparrows. Since then we’ve gone from zero to eight breeding pairs, with as many as forty birds in the garden in Winter. They are gregarious birds, happiest in a flock and in this garden raise two broods a year, further South three broods a year is the norm.

Next up has to be the Robin, unlike the Sparrows when it comes to their own kind they’re far from sociable, fiercely defending their territory against other red-breasted trespassers. At home it seems the uneasy border of the two pairs that nest here runs North – South splitting the garden, and the house which also runs north south, neatly in half. North pair nested in an open fronted box pinned a half dozen feet up the trunk of a Larch while South pair, ignoring a nest box that I’d fixed to the trunk of an ancient Rowan, nested instead in a nearby moorland edge pile of bramble and brash – maybe they didn’t like the curtains. The bird in the picture has yet to moult into its true red breast, he or she is still sporting the buff waistcoat that splits adult from youngster.

Next is a Summer visitor, the Willow warbler. Like South pair robins they also hide their nests in briars and thick vegetation, often nesting directly on the ground. The garden itself would be too busy for them but between garden and moor there’s an area that is pretty much left to do its own thing, the ground thick with bramble and feral honeysuckle. It’s a deliberately untamed patch, a place where warblers and pipits quietly weave nests and where cuckoos call and lurk – hoping to sneak an egg into an unguarded clutch. The bird in the picture was caught having a bath, normally they’re glimpsed in tree tops rather than seen out in the open. They leave us in early September and by now he or she will be well on the way to sub-saharan Africa.

Next up is another summer visitor, the Swallow. I can’t imagine a summer without them. For us they’re the garden harbinger, a bringer of Spring and Autumn. At the moment they’re still here, soon like the warbler above, they’ll leave for Africa. In the confines of the back garden, enclosed on three sides by trees and on the fourth by the house, they’re Big-top performers, looping the loop and flying tight figures of eight. In the wider landscape they skim the grasses of the meadow and soar high above the moor. If money were no object I’d build a small open barn at the edge of the meadow, just for them, somewhere to nest and roost. The bird in the photo would have hatched early in Summer, it (almost) has its adult-bird tail streamers but the giveaway that it’s a juvenile is the soft and wrinkly custard yellow gape at the base of its beak.

Number five is another warbler. When we moved here the aim was, and is, to make this small patch of land as diverse for wildlife as we could. Money for projects is always tight so there are some things that will likely never be done (a swallow barn) and other things that have cost so little and made such a difference. One of those projects lies at the bottom of the meadow, in a place where the ground flattens out just before falling into the bay. It’s permanently wet, was thick with a monoculture of Rush and was the perfect spot to dig ponds and plant a willow coppice. The ponds were dug by excavator, a half day and they were done, broomstick thick willow cuttings went in by the hundred and slowly but surely the area has gone from Rush monoculture to a mini wetland habitat. This year, for the first time, Sedge warblers were seen, I thought they were passing through but a few weeks later saw an adult with food in its beak. They’re a shy bird and it took a while before juveniles were spotted, their habit of staying deep in cover and constantly flitting from branch to branch makes it hard to get a photo but this one, already sporting adult plumage but with the giveaway yellow gape, played ball, posing for a few seconds amongst a stand of fading Meadow sweet.

Last but definitely not least comes the Great tit. It’s estimated that in the UK there are some 2.5 million breeding pairs. Come North, beyond Caithness & Sutherland though and that figure drops to zero. In Orkney they’re a rare and very brief visitor, so rare that in 2025, when a male turned up in the garden in the Spring and subsequently stayed for the year, both the RSPB warden and the county bird recorder took a note of his presence. He took over a spare House sparrow nest box and lived the summer as a hopeful bachelor boy. Fast forward to this year and two birds were seen, a male and female. Prompted by the bachelor boy we had already installed Great tit friendly boxes in the winter – to keep out chunkier house sparrow squatters, they just need a smaller 30mm entrance hole. For the next few weeks they kept us on tenterhooks, checking out different nest boxes but never seemingly making a decision on whether to settle. In the end the winter nest box building was in vain. They chose an empty House sparrow box instead, one of five on a Sycamore cul-de-sac. After that the tenterhooks really kicked in, would the clutch fail? Would a Sparrow hawk catch one of them? Would we disturb them? In early June they started to feed chicks and on June the 21st the nest went dead, no life, no adults to be seen. That was it, the nest had failed, the adults had left . A week later, from the Kitchen window we saw an adult, alongside him a paler bird, then two, then three. They had been hiding in plain sight and it felt like Christmas. In the end they reared six young, the photo below is the one that made the local paper. The county bird recorder did his due diligence and after trawling through records dating back centuries declared it to be the first breeding record for the county of Orkney. They’re still in the garden and down in the willow coppice we’ve seen a second adult male. Hopefully he too will find a mate. Small pioneers who made our gardening year.

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Six on Saturday – 3/10/2026

Weather wise, if you had to sum up the past couple of weeks in Orkney, the word you would use is wet. The rain has occasionally felt almost biblical, closing roads and washing the stone from rough tracks. The horseshoe shaped ditch that protects the garden from run off from the hill is in full flow, rushing peat stained water, dark as strong tea, to a nearby burn and then down to the sea.

On one of the drier days I took myself off to the coast of South Walls, Hoys smaller island neighbour. The forecast wasn’t great, heavy showers with rain setting in as the day went on. The sky was leaden, grey scudding clouds cut occasionally by brief shafts of sunshine

I went to the bay of Osmundwall, it’s home to a small sandy beach and there’s a footpath that follows a lichen clad stone-dyke that skirts the field boundaries and eventually leads to the islands Eastern coast. Once on the coast there are places, if the tide is out, where low shelves of rock stretch out into the sea. A great spot to watch wildlife and listen to the crescendo of surf against stone. In the photograph below the shelves can be seen to the right of the frame .The barrel and old cart axle in the foreground of the picture would once have been an ad hoc strainer post for a wire fence. The axle will be set into the rock, the barrel itself, along with the rest of the fence, has long since disappeared, only the concrete that filled it remains.

As you walk out onto the rocks care has to be taken, wet bladderwrack is lethal to walk on, the seashore equivalent of black ice. More than once I’ve done the splits or gone down on my arse. The stone is also alive – in places detours are made to avoid walking on sea anemones. Anchored to the rock they wait for the tides return – a dot painting brought to life.

Fulmars were feeding close to the shore, it was a breezy lean into the wind sort of day with a heavy swell on the sea. They showed with ease their mastery of the water and the air, rising and falling with the swell, feet in the water, wings on the breeze, delicately picking up their prey.

Further out from the fulmars Grey seals were seen, they too must have been feeding, popping up for a few seconds before diving again. In November the females will haul out into cobble strewn geo’s and give birth to doe-eyed pups.

When rain started to patter on the hood of my coat I took shelter in one of those cobble strewn geo’s. There’s a snapshot of the islands history writ large on its wall – a volcanic vent. Formed in the Devonian period when Orkney sat close to the equator. It’s harshly beautiful and a little bit awe inspiring, making you realise just what a brief click of a finger and thumb a human lifetime is. Not far from the geo lie the remains of an Iron age Broch, a 2000 year old structure built of 400 million year old stone.

Back at Osmundwall the tide had gone out. Beyond the sand, out on the black-ice bladderwrack, dog-collared Ringed plovers sat out the day. Like the anemones they were waiting for the tides return. They’re small easily overlooked waders that in Summer, if you stray too close to their nests, will feign a broken wing, fluttering helplessly along a few yards in front of you. Once happy that they’ve drawn you out to a suitable distance the wing will miraculously heal and off they will fly, back to eggs or chicks hidden amongst the sand and shingle.

Beyond the plovers dozens of young Shags were seen, at this time of year they form up in loose flotillas, learning to dive and fish in the bays sheltered waters. The collective term for them, probably appropriate for a group teenage birds, is a “hangout”

In Orkney Autumn has arrived with a bit of a bang, rain and grey skies aplenty and today, just for good measure, we’ve got gales and the threat of ferry cancellations, rinse and repeat for tomorrow. Despite the downturn the garden will last for a few weeks yet – some plants are literally just getting into their stride. It’s fair to say though that this month marks the start of the gardens swan song. There are other things to look forward to now, in the wider landscape skeins of Pink-footed geese are already being seen, heading South after summering in Iceland and Greenland. Next will come the musical yap of Barnacle geese, settling in to graze stubble and pasture, our harbingers of Winter. The night sky with its uncountable pin pricks of light, absent for the Summer unless you got up at silly o-clock, is visible again. 

Back to the garden, this weeks Six on Saturday is a half dozen September favourites. 

First up is a fairly new plant for this garden, Rudbeckia ‘goldsturm‘. Grown from seed a few years ago they’re now dotted everywhere, they’re perfect for this neck of the woods – tough as old boots and rarely needing a support. One of those “why didn’t we grow it years ago” plants. This one is just unfurling, yet to show the dark central cone that gives it the alternative name of Black eyed Susan.

A favourite that we have grown here since we started a garden is Sedum ‘matrona‘. A member of the stonecrop family that sports soft pink flowers on ruby-purple stems, a magnet for butterflies and pollinators. Gardening lore says sedums shouldn’t really do well here but plants don’t read books and so far, despite our autumn and winter wet, it’s thriving, a little bit floppy though if we don’t split it every year.

Jacqui is a live and let live gardener, generally leaving annuals and biennials to self sow and do their own thing. One of our favourite pop up anywhere plants is a Toadflax – linaria purpurea ‘canon went‘, It’s actually a perennial but at home it’s treated like an annual, leave it be and let it pop up where it wants. It flowers here for much of the year but in autumn, as everything starts to die back, it comes into its own, becoming a stand alone plant that now takes centre stage.

Next is an Anemone, this one is bressingham glow. As with the sedum it’s another one that could be a bit dodgy here due to our very wet winters but as with the other anemone’s we grow, so far so good.

Next comes Astrantia claret, as with the linaria it’s not strictly an autumn plant, it flowers here in early summer, gets cut back after flowering and then reliably flowers again through late August and September. Unlike the sedums and anemones we grow this is truly a plant for Orkney, a lover of damp soils and cool summers.

Last but not least comes Crocosmia, a genus that’s an autumn mainstay for this garden. We grow ten or so varieties in various shades of yellow, red and orange, and for here, where trees will go from green to scorched brown and then to bare branches in almost the blink of an eye, the crocosmias, along with the rudbeckias, give us our autumn colour. This one is columbus.

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Six on Saturday – 19/9/2026

This weeks Six on Saturday is a selection of wildflowers, a subject close to my heart. Like most houses on the island, as well as a garden space, the house also came with a parcel of land, and again, as with most houses on the island, that parcel of land was mostly moor. To the front though, between house and sea there was a small field, overgrown to waist height with Soft rush and coarse grass and with a bed of thatch so thick and springy that to walk on it felt like walking across a trampoline. It was pretty barren, from a wildlife point of view, a duo culture that we set about clearing one Winter with rake and pitchfork and an old diesel power scythe. The following year we cut it hard until the end of May and then allowed it to grow. By summers end it had transformed, so many species appeared, fine grasses and multiple varieties of wildflower, all must have lain dormant, perhaps for decades, waiting for light and warmth to bring the fields slumbering seed bank to life.

First up is the foxglove, this was a surprising sight, not a plant of meadows but up popped a half dozen of them. They were marked with canes and mown around so that the following year their seed could be saved and scattered in a newly planted shelter belt. They haven’t reappeared, but the rapidly establishing shelter belt floor is now thick with their offspring.

Next is Wild Angelica, a plant that introduced itself within a couple of years of the fields reincarnation as a meadow. Like the foxglove above they’re a biennial but they sit low enough in their first year of life to be unbothered by the meadows Autumn mowing regime. For us they’re quite statuesque, often achieving a height of four feet or more but travel half a mile from here to the wind scoured headland of Brims, where they duck the easterlies ripping in off the sea, and they are barely twelve inches tall.

Next up is the Yellow Iris, not truly a plant of the meadow, at home they live in an old boat noust, a natural or man made hollow where boats would be hauled up out of harms way of Winter storms. The noust here is man made and sits half way up the low cliff, where meadow falls to sea, and must at some point have had a winch or pulley system to drag a boat twenty feet up a now long disappeared timber ramp. Yellow iris has a long history of multiple uses, among others the rhizomes of the plant were used to produce a black dye for ink, the leaves were used for basket weaving and thatching and a potion could be made that was said to cure toothache. The seeds were ground up to make a form of snuff. On the Orkney mainland remains of Yellow iris were found in the 5000 year old middens of Skara Brae.

Next comes Yarrow, a plant that on Hoy is seen on the coasts and amongst dry grasslands but is absent from much of the island due to its dislike of wet feet and acid soil. At home they’re a late Summer flower, just getting into their stride when many other species have already faded to seed. As with the Iris there’s a list of old uses as long as your arm. It’s said to be a healer of wounds caused by iron weapons and a hint for this comes from its latin name,  achillea millefolium, a reference to Achilles. In Orkney tea was and likely still is made from it and across the pond indigenous tribes used it as a mosquito repellent.

Next comes another late Summer flower, the Devils-bit scabious, whose blue pom-pom flowerheads are a magnet for butterflies. We had a small group of them appear and as they set seed and multiplied young plants were lifted and dotted through the meadow. They’re quite low growing and we were careful to choose areas that had little competition from grasses, slowly but surely they are starting to spread. In medieval times it was a seen as a cure for scabies and its name comes from a story that the Devil, in a fit of jealousy over the plants virtue, bit off a lump of its admittedly stubby root.

Last but not least comes Cats-ear, the plant, that in the first Summer after clearing the field made all the hard work worth it. Within a few weeks, once we had stopped mowing the now scalped field, cats-ears appeared in abundance, not one or two but a literal carpet of yellow. I would love to know how long the seeds had lain dormant, the seeds are dandelion like but with none growing on adjacent ground I doubt that any blew in. The seed, in a field that had not been mown or grazed in living memory, must simply have been biding its time. Since then they’ve spread to other parts of the plot, the edge of the shelter belt and recently onto an area of ground disturbed by the laying of a cable at the edge of the moor. One of natures pioneers.

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Six on Saturday – 12/9/2026

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.

My last six on Saturday was a half dozen favourite garden blooms, this time it’s the turn of favourite garden birds. As with the blooms, choosing six favourite birds is nigh on impossible but here goes.

First up is the Starling, for me a beautiful and much overlooked bird. As a child, on the small East Yorkshire council estate that I grew up on, it seemed that the pantiled roof of every house had at least one Starlings nest under the eves. We called them Sheppies, a name which surely must originate from their habit of hitching rides on the backs of sheep. Starling itself comes from the Anglo Saxon, little star, some say it’s named for its star spangled plumage, others for its silhouette shape in flight.

Next up comes another bird that, like the Starling, sometimes gets bad press in a garden environment, the Woodpigeon. We don’t see many here, on Hoy Rock/feral doves, who roost on the cliffs and raid the garden daily, are much more numerous. These two are regular visitors, quite shy when compared to the Rock doves who arrive at dawn to hoover up all before them. Woodpigeon nests are flimsy, a thin and semi-transparent platform of twigs through which the typical clutch of two white eggs can often be seen. Years ago, on a farm where the barns were being rewired, I found a hedgerow nest made entirely of offcuts of electrical cable. Twigs of blue, brown and yellow-green, each with a bright copper core.

We get a lot of Finches here, regular readers will know that the plan was always to make this plot not just human but also wildlife friendly and as time has progressed bird numbers have increased. Of the ten species of Finch we have seen here, five are now regular breeders. Of those the Siskin is by far the most tolerant of humans, a tiny finch that arrives here in April, along with its equally diminutive Lesser Redpoll cousins. The photo below is an example of their tolerance, the bird was so close that I had to step back to allow the camera to focus.

Next comes the Wren, not quite the Uk’s smallest resident bird, that prize goes to the Goldcrest, but if there was a prize for the loudest song from the smallest body, the Wren would win it hands down. A bird that sings its heart out. Nest sites are always inventive and varied, among other places we’ve had them inside a ball of twine, in an old, rotting from the inside out, gatepost, and up on the moor I once found a nest at almost ground level, tucked low in a protective arch of heathers.

Next is a bird whose arrival here can almost be timed to the day, each year on around the 20th of April, we’ll hear the first Cuckoo call. In the North they’re the Gowk, from the norse, gaukr. Their call is said to be a bringer of good or bad fortune, depending on from which direction you first hear it. A call from West is the best, said to bring a promise of a prosperous year. At home we hear them first on the moor, which is due west – I live in hope. Another proverb, that hails from my childhood in Yorkshire, says that on hearing the first Cuckoo you should, for good luck, turn over the coins in your pocket.

And lastly, the villain of the piece, the Sparrow hawk. One of natures natural born killers. In reality they’re no villain, more a sign of a balanced eco system, a system healthy enough to support apex predators. They visit here pretty much daily and their arrival is announced by an explosion of wings, as birds of all sizes scatter or seek shelter from bright eyes and sharp talons. The Rock doves mentioned earlier, are a hawk early warning system. Always alert they’re the first to scatter, giving a vital few seconds warning to smaller less aware birds. The one below is a female, sitting out the rain and ever watchful. She’s a quarter larger and twice as heavy as the male, capable of tackling prey up to and including the size of a Wood pigeon. In past times her old english name was Spar. To a norseman she was Freya, after the goddess whose cloak of feathers allowed her to turn into a hawk. The noticeably smaller male is a musket, from mosca – a Fly.

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One of my favourite places to walk lies at the Southern tip of Hoy. On OS maps it has the name of Rotten loch which I assumed, like most places here, would be a corruption of old norse. It seems not and as there’s no loch to be seen, perhaps it has silted up, I’m going to lay the rotten part on the fetid black water that in places oozes up from your boot steps. It’s a low and undulating landscape of coastal grassland and wide shallow Geo’s and it’s a real haven for wildlife. The ground is wet in winter, wettish in summer and like much of this island, with its thin soil and tractor unfriendly gradients, it can’t be mown or tilled. A few sheep and a herd of semi-feral cattle wander here and there, keeping the sward short and wildflower rich.

In places, at this time of year, the land wears a confetti of pink, if you had the time (or inclination) Heath-spotted orchids could be counted by the thousand. In really wet spots, where even in summer every footstep is a squelch, Orchids are replaced by Ragged robin, a close cousin of Red campion whose torn and tattered looking flowers give the impression that they have been shredded by the easterlies that regularly whip in from the sea.

Locally Heath-spotted orchids are “Eve’s”. Northern-marsh orchids, that also grow here in abundance, are “Adams”

It’s generally agreed that Orkney has seven species of butterfly, rising to nine or ten when you count summer migrants. This year, with an influx of Painted ladies, it’s ten, next year the ladies may be shy and we may drop back down to nine. Of the ones I see at Rotten loch, my favourite is the Common blue, a resident species. They’re the Kingfisher of the butterfly world, a brief flash of violet-blue wings and they’re gone, flitting from clover to clover. 

In winter the background noise comes from the rolling crash of surf. In summer there’s still the crash of water on stone – the land rolls down to shore of the rarely calm waters of the Pentland Firth, but at this time of year the seas rumbling and endless  battle with terra firma is overshadowed by the call of birds. It’s a breeding ground for many species, from Skylarks through to Black-backed gulls. As you walk the birds give a running commentary, warning fledgelings of a two legged interloper. Most vocal are carrot billed Oystercatchers and bright legged Redshanks, as you walk they follow you, their calls repeated on a high pitched loop. Either species would be a great tone for an alarm clock, impossible to sleep through.

Above your head Lesser-blacked gulls follow and circle, warning fledgelings with a nasal “Khow-khow”. The fledglings meanwhile just watch you pass by, wondering what all the fuss is about.

The shoreline is ragged, cut by the tides. A favourite spot to sit is a geo that lies close to the site of a long lost Broch. Wide and shallow it must once have been perfect for the men who built Brochs to launch their boats from, vessels that likely wore a skin of seal hide over a skeleton of willow. There are two large flat boulders, sea smoothed and backside friendly. I sat for a while and when the tide lapped my boots and pushed me away, I took a photograph with a deliberate long exposure, just enough to blur time and water.

As I set up the tripod, a bull Grey seal whose ancestors skins may once have become Iron Age boats, eyed proceedings from a reef of black rock, occasionally shifting his weight as the incoming tide threatened to lift him from his berth. In the shallows of the reef an Eider and her ducklings were diving for molluscs. The ducklings were in their element, buoyant as corks, briefly popping to the surface before quickly diving again. I got lucky with the duckling at the top of the page, a fleeting eye to eye contact before he or she upended and disappeared, joining mum and siblings for a hunt amongst the kelp. 

An oystercatcher dozed on a rock, probably exhausted after a serious pleep at the human session. As with the shot of the geo I wanted to use a long exposure, blurred sea around a sharp oystercatcher. The foldaway tripod that I usually carry is great for my little fuji camera that gets used for landscapes and the like, but with legs like Bambi it’s not so good for the camera and long lens combo that gets used for wildlife. Rather than put the best part of 4kg on a 1kg tripod I sat down, balanced elbow on knee and with the camera and lens in the crook of my arm, set a two second exposure. The sea blurred as expected but rock and oystercatcher aren’t quite sharp. Knee, elbow and crook clearly don’t make a very good tripod but I quite like the painterly effect. To be tried again with a heavier tripod, or maybe a lighter camera 🙂

I’m an avid reader of other peoples blogs, be they about photography, gardening or wildlife.  A recent find has been Six on Saturday, a blog written by Jim Stephens, who is based in East Cornwall, at the opposite end of the country from this neck of the woods. 

I know a lot of the old Plot 29 gang from Allan Jenkins much missed Grauniad column visit this blog and one thing that was often said in the comments on AJ’s column was “we wish we could post photo’s of our own plots”, that prompted me to write my own blog and the beauty of Jims blog is that you can, and are actively encouraged to, add a link to six photographs from your own plot, be they from facebook, twitter or indeed a blog of your own. These are my Six on Saturday, a half dozen favourite summer blooms, three of mine, three of Jacqui’s (aka the Head gardener 😉)

A favourite of Jacqui’s, Thalictrum black stockings, the Meadow rue, a leggy five foot tall plant that in late June tops its black stems with a candy floss of flowers. For this garden, with its regular summer gales, it needs a discreet stake or two. Great in sun or part shade

This one is a happy accident, we make our compost with liberal quantities of seaweed collected from the shore and the Mayweed seeds probably came home with a load of what’s locally called tang & ware. It’s said to be a perennial but for us it’s quite short lived and is best seen as an annual. The upside is that it self sows freely, the downside is that should you be inclined to use it, its latin name is virtually unpronounceable.

Geraniums do well here and are pretty much a mainstay of the garden. As the caption says this one is Summer snow. Of all the varieties we grow, it’s the easiest to overlook. It’s not a clump former, is leggy and, if I’m honest, a bit scrawny. It has tiny flowers, no bigger than the nail of your little finger, but it’s a favourite because, like the mayweed above, once planted it will self sow like a poppy. It appears wherever it chooses, often getting a leg up from taller plants, at the moment we have one growing through a purple leafed Elder.

This is really a joint favourite, the Schilling spurge, another one that in this garden needs to be staked. With its bright yellow flowers held on green leaved stems it’s one of those plants that can be put anywhere, this one is growing with Astrantia roma. It looks good whatever companion you give it and is also a great foil for dark leaved shrubs.

In our old south facing, sandy soil plot in East yorkshire, to grow meconopsis would have been an act of plant cruelty, here, with our cool and often wet but relatively free draining soil, they’re a plant that does really well. We’ve no idea of the name of this one, a lucky survivor, found by accident when we cleared the garden of chest high brambles.

Last but not least comes a Kniphofia “fiery fred”, a red hot poker. We’ve tried a few pokers here and fred by far has proved to be the best. We grow it in both sun and semi shade and for me it looks best when it’s backlit – at this time of year we have a late evening magic hour in the back garden, when everything is lit by the “about to disappear behind the Hoy hills” sun. A favourite time for taking photographs. Named after the Yorkshire cricketer, “Fiery Fred Truman”.

Jim’s blog. https://gardenruminations.co.uk

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.