A garden in Orkney

This morning we woke to snow. Heavy overnight showers born on bitter air drawn down from the north. The weather changed by the minute, bright sun, heavy skies. Snow showers that stole the view.

We took a walk along the road and then followed a track up onto the moor, towards the valley of Heldale. A merlin and hen harrier were seen. The merlin dark and dashing, the harrier taking her time, quartering the white over ground, hoping for an unlucky stonechat or pipit.

The past week saw a mixed bag of weather. Monday and Tuesday dawning dry and bright, light winds and blue skies. Wednesday brought gales and cancelled ferries. A small respite on Thursday and then more of the same, the gales are set to run out of steam by lunchtime today.

Days are drawing out, light now by eight and dusk by four thirty, a month ago dusk would start to draw a veil over the day at not much after three. Despite the longer days the sun still sits low in the sky. Morning and afternoon light casting long shadows.

In the garden, gales permitting, we started to thin out shelter belt alders, choosing the thinnest, those that were being overshadowed by stronger siblings. Giving space for the others to thicken and grow. Nearest to the garden, where space allows, we’ll now start to add other species, pink flowering ribes sanguineum for early flying bumblebees, amelanchier canadensis for autumn colour. Both have proved to be hardy here.

The thin alder trunks have been put to good use. At the southern edge of the rear garden a simple zig-zag fence has been started, a divider between a shady border and a small in progress copse of trees. Not a barrier, just a full stop for the eye, the garden ends here.

The brash, tied in bundles, was placed here and there among rough grasses at the edge of the moor. A haunt of Stonechats and Meadow Pipits. In spring the males of the latter rise like larks before slowly falling back earthwards like a leaf on a still autumn day, a display flight for the ladies of the species. They nest among tussocks and may well set up home beneath the twiggy brash, if not, a lair for spiders and others.

As the first bundles were placed four Red grouse were flushed, bursting away, skimming the heather at sheeps back height. Birds that are often heard here but rarely seen.

Greylags visited the meadow, grazing the short mown sward before dozing away the afternoon. At least one bird always on guard, head up and alert, honking a low warning if we were spotted in the garden.

With shelter belt trees planted we started on the rear garden. Brambles, Docks and Osiers, a type of willow that in summer would grow to eight feet, only to scorch black in autumn gales, were cut back with a flail mower. After that the roots of the osiers and brambles, and of anything else planted by previous owners that had succumbed to salt laden gales, were grubbed up with a hired mini digger. All were pushed and pulled into a long mound at the edge of the moor. A low ugly bonfire perhaps ten paces deep and sixty long. We didn’t light it up and within a year or two mother nature had, as we had hoped, transformed it from bonfire to rich habitat. Honeysuckle and re-rooted bramble scramble over and through it, spikes of pink foxgloves stretch up for the light. Rotting roots sprout half a dozen colours of fungi. A spot for Starlings to rest and gossip and where visiting Woodcock quietly while away the daylight hours. A place for warblers and others to weave secret nests.

The ground slopes upwards away from the house, a simple curving wall of stone salvaged from the garden was built to give a terrace that softened the slope. Higher up the garden we planned a single curving path. This and the low wall would divide the garden into three, rising from east to west. A level area near the house, a large central border above the terrace wall and another long and narrow border between new path and shelter belt. The southern edge of the garden would become a shady border, courtesy of the sycamores. The path was roughly marked out with a hose. When we were happy with the shape, the hose stayed in place as a guide for more salvaged stone to be set for path edges. Paths themselves would be stone chips, quarried in Orkney and delivered in a single sixteen tonne bulk load, enough to leave a few tonnes spare for topping up as time goes on. Borders were to be as wide as possible, with stepping stones, either flat sea worn slabs or caithness slate, weaving through them and giving access. The following photographs show progress to the summer of 2023. With the exception of the load of stone chips all the materials for the garden were free, some salvaged, some from the garden, some from the shore.

Before a rear garden could be started we needed to give it shelter. Something to filter 60mph summer curve ball gales. As mentioned in a previous post we inherited a few trees, the oldest are two coppiced sycamores at the western edge of what would become the garden. There’s also a younger purple leaved sycamore that lives up to its name only in spring, leaves that unfurl a warm purple bronze turning green by mid-summer. To the north there’s a small group of conifers, larch and sitka spruce, tucked among them a spindly and very out of place for here horse chestnut, perhaps bought as a sapling further south and brought home, perhaps grown from a conker slipped into a holiday pocket. An old rowan also sits on the edge of what is now the rear garden. A testament to stubborn survival, the first eight feet of its gale blown trunk lies horizontally along the ground, over the years new growth has sprung from it to give a multi-stemmed tree. Almost as wide as it is tall, branches thick with moss and lichen.

The old adage is that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, for Orkney probably forty. We needed something that would grow quickly, filling the gaps that allowed winds to race in off the moor unhindered. We’d settled on a grey leaved willow, salix hookeriana, a native of the west coast of America. Although it grows well in Orkney, and like most willows strikes easily from cuttings, a downer is that once it reaches a height it has a habit of snapping in the wind. We would have to plant them in rows like redcoats waiting for battle, coppicing each row on a staggered cycle before the wind did it for us.

A visit to a Mainland nursery turned this on its head. We got chatting to the owner who took us to the edge of his just as exposed as ours garden, he pointed out a tall Red Alder and asked for a guess of its age-15/20 years?. The answer was seven, he had two hundred spare, end of season, eighteen inches tall and a £1 each, “how many did we want?” We managed to fit all two hundred in the car.

As they grow they bring more life to the garden. In the leaf litter Foxgloves and Celandines turned up unbidden. Bird sown brambles weave among them. Wild garlic, cadged from a garden across the bay, is slowly spreading. In autumn Siskins hang like acrobats from ripe cones, this week a group of Long tailed tits, a volery, flitted among them.

The old Rowan now wrapped on three sides by sheltering Alders is putting on new growth, heavy with berries in autumn. Each spring, in the leaf litter below it, a gift of dozens of thumb high seedlings. Potted on for a year or two before going out to new homes, tucked low among the heathers up on the hill. If lucky they’ll dodge the gales and Mountain Hares and decades from now their branches will also hang thick with moss and lichen.

The past week brought bitter cold. A bright still day saw a rime of ice form on the bay below the meadow, a phenomenon seen only at slack tide on the calmest and coldest of days. Two burns that rush rainwater from the hills to the shore empty close by, a calm sea allows freshwater to float on heavier saltwater. Ice as thin and clear as polythene stretching out a dozen yards from the shore. Most days though brought grey skies, snow and northerly winds. The snow drifting in places and keeping the islands gritter wagon busy, each morning distant spinning orange cab top lights giving away his pre-dawn route.

Plans to thin out shelter belt Alders were put on hold, planted five years ago at a stride or two spacings the strongest are now shading out the weakest. The best as thick as your thigh, the worst thin as your wrist. They won’t be wasted, twiggy branches will be saved for summer plant supports, thinner witches broom brash tied in bundles will go in a stack at the edge of the trees, a new des res for woodlice and beetles. The thin arrow straight trunks will be saved for a simple garden edge criss cross fence, hung between salvaged from the shore driftwood posts.

The cold brought Fieldfares to the garden. A small flock of perhaps fifty birds quietly dropping into the Sycamores during a fall of snow. Half apples on rebar put out for Blackbirds proved to be Fieldfare magnets. With a single bird playing king of the castle more apples were offered, dropped at intervals along a garden path as if someone had walked past with a bag with a hole in it.

The thaw came yesterday. Milder air and rain carried in on strengthening south-westerlies. Harbingers of soon to arrive storm Isha. Snow slid in sheets off the skylights and roof. The garden turned back to dark earth. The ditch where garden meets moor is running the colour of strong tea, melting snow filtered through peat.

The Fieldfares left with the snow, back to their more usual haunts of pasture and coastal heath. Living up to their old anglo-saxon name, feldware, traveller of the fields.

Hoy is the second largest island in the Orkney archipelago. Mainland, where you’ll find Stromness with its cobbled streets and Kirkwall with its Cathedral being the largest. The population of Mainland is around twenty thousand, for Hoy around four hundred.

Hoy has two parishes, Hoy and North & South Walls. To the north in the parish of Hoy the island rises almost 1600 feet to the top of Ward Hill. A moorland landscape of hills and glacier cut valleys. Here you’ll find White tailed eagles and, in the valley of Berriedale, Britains most northerly ancient woodland. This end of the island gives Hoy its name, the Norsemen’s Haey, high island.

From the valley of Rackwick, where depending on the mood of the sea, the shore can be sand or a tumble of stone, a walk will take you to the Old Man, a 450 feet high red sandstone sea stack. Climbed by Chris Bonnington in the mid 1960s and televised live by the BBC.

Head south along the single track road and the land slowly starts to flatten, still dominated by moor but the hills are gentler, rolling across the land like a low swell on the sea. As you pass the lonely grave of Betty Corrigal, a story for another day, you leave the parish of Hoy and enter North Walls. A few miles further on at Lyness where the lifeline ferry docks, heather slowly starts to give way to agriculture, low lying fields of pasture standing in contrast to the moors above them.

Carry on south and as you leave North Walls you’ll cross the Ayre, a now permanent causeway, onto the island of South Walls. Low lying and fertile, in summer a patchwork of greens and the gold of barley. Eventually you’ll reach the lighthouse at Cantick Head. To the south around four miles away you’ll see the coast of Caithness. By road from Rackwick to Cantick you’ll have travelled around twenty-four miles. The Norsemen also gave Walls its name, waas, a voe, a narrow sea inlet.

Green spears of new growth are starting to push through the earth, Camassia, Daffodil and Snowdrop are starting to show. In the race to flower Snowdrops will be the clear winner but a while yet before they carpet the ground white. Daffodils come next, Tete a Tete then Thalia and finally Pheasants eye, the latter flowering well into May.

The past week was wet and sometimes wild, gales and rain and monochrome skies. The coming week is more settled, high pressure in charge. Light winds and sunshine, a chance to catch up with outdoor jobs.

Young trees recently planted among rough grass and heather low down on the moor will need to be checked for wind rock. Most are Red Alder, our pioneer tree, happy on the poorest of soils. Three years ago high on the moor on a spot where soil was eroding due to our sometimes almost biblical rain I planted a group of Red Alder. The peaty topsoil had washed away leaving shaley bedrock, the ground so hard that planting holes were made with an iron bar. I checked on them a few months ago, lashed by gales from every side, without stakes or shelter. They were thriving, chest high and thick stemmed.

New trees at the top of the meadow will also be checked. An L shape of Red and Italian Alder giving shelter to an infill of Rowan and Whitebeam with Amelanchier Canadensis that, gales permitting, might give a brief show of Autumn colour. At the front of the copse, facing South-east, a few dozen gorse went in. The vanilla scent of the flowers bringing back memories of an East Yorkshire childhood, a Delf full of Gorse and Linnets nests lined with horsehair.

A male Hen Harrier was seen hunting the shore. A grey ghost of a bird floating a few feet above the low cliff, almost lost in the half light of dawn. Common Dolphins came into the bay, a pod of three coming close to the shore, the sound of blowhole breaths carrying across the water.

Our house sits tucked low in the landscape, halfway between the islands ferry terminal at Lyness and the settlement of Longhope in an area of ground named on old maps as Simmary, Norse for Summer or Summery. East facing front gardens benefit from the first rays of a rising sun, on the longest days with the sun high in the sky they keep the sunlight for most of the day, losing it in late afternoon to the shadow of the hill. The rear garden is shadier, courtesy of two old multi stemmed Sycamores that at sometime in the past have been coppiced. Perhaps by a man for firewood or perhaps much earlier in their lives by an escapee Sheep. By mid-afternoon they rob half of the garden of light. A border beneath them has turned out to be the perfect spot for Hosta’s and other shade lovers.

The soil is dark, in places almost a silt, at the most a spit or two deep. Some areas are heavy with stone. Once a working croft digging a hole can be interesting, the worst find a rusting trailer chassis, the best the foundation of a byre, salvaged with a mini-digger and reused as dry stone dykes were rebuilt.

We inherited the Sycamores and an ancient Rowan and to the North edge of the garden a few Sitka and Larch. A small stand of Lodge Pole Pines were lost a couple of years ago when storm Arwen swung in from the North. A shelter belt of Red Alder has been planted, five years on they are already taller than the house. Tough fast growing trees hailing from Canada’s pacific coast, so far so good, shrugging off the worst of the salt laden winds.

Beyond the front garden there’s a field that slopes down to the shore. A project to convert it from monoculture to meadow is underway, three years in the change has been dramatic. Beyond the meadow is North Bay, a haunt of Eiders and Harbour Seals, a bob of twenty or so of the latter hauling out daily onto the rocks thirty feet below the meadow. In Summer Fulmars nest on the low cliff, the adult birds riding the breeze, flying figures of eight on set wings.

At the back walk through the young trees and the moor rises away from you, close to the shelter belt Honeysuckle and Bramble are left to run wild, beyond that a mix of rough grasses newly planted with Alder, Rowan and Whitebeam. As the ground gets steeper Heathers are dominant, ankle high, cropped tight by the wind. Here and there are other species, spikes of Deer Grass and the green tongues of Ferns, wet spots have Cotton Grass. Bright Mosses cover rocks as if poured from a bucket. Bleak and beautiful, a home to Hen Harriers and Mountain Hares.

The year has turned. The shortest days are behind us. Still not light here much before nine and on a grey day dusk by three thirty but the days will lengthen now, slowly at first and then rapidly. By June the sun will barely dip below the horizon, the time of the ‘Simmer Dim’.

December brought almost daily gales and rain, the gales testing trees, the rain making the ground sodden. In the new meadow every footstep is a squelch, in the veg plot mud sticks to boots, too clarty to dig, spiky pin cushion seedlings of Rush dotting ground that in summer grew salads and spuds, the edge of moor plot doing its best to revert back nature. Close to the shore two wildlife ponds dug in spring are full to bursting, the ditch that feeds them running like a stream.

The garden is slumbering, waiting for longer and warmer days. Snowdrops have yet to push through the earth and tell of a coming spring. Perennials that lit borders bright with colour in summer are reduced to low leafy mounds, biding their time, a thin dressing of compost, green waste from the garden and tang and ware from the shore, covers the bare earth. Foliage and seed heads scorched by storm Babet, a three day visit of salt laden winds, have been cut back and composted. There are no lingering reds and golds of autumn here, no winter frosted seed heads. Gales are the gardens secateurs, once shelter belt trees have lost their leaves they sweep in unopposed, knocking flat and scorching brown, deciding when the garden is finished for the year.

Cold frames though are full of new life, cell trays of seedlings sown in late summer, a few are perennials for the garden but most are wildflowers, top up plants for the newly reinstated meadow. Most are easy, some like Ox-eye and Yarrow only have to be shown compost, once sown growing as thick as grass. Others are more tardy, Wood Cranesbill are taking their time, some appeared within days, others only now pushing through, weeks after sowing. Devils Bit Scabious are yet to show, a favourite, as the year warms and the days lengthen fingers are crossed that one morning as cold frames are opened up the trays they are sown in will be found to be dusted green with new seedlings.

Birds are busy on the feeders. Finches are counted by the dozen. On a front garden Rowan Greenfinch and Goldfinch are vying for feeder space with House Sparrows and ever squabbling Starlings. Chaffinches take the less stressful route, searching the ground beneath shelter belt trees in the company of Collared Doves and Blackbirds for bird seed mix cast daily among the leaf litter.

Fieldfares and Redwings are being seen again, absent for the past few weeks, the Redwings joining the Chaffinches and Doves amongst the leaf litter, the Fieldfares are seen on cliff tops, groups of ten and twenty searching rough pasture and wind scoured coastal heath, soon we’ll see hundreds. Waxwings may be seen again, autumn visitors from Scandinavia who like the Redwings and Fieldfares will soon be heading back North to breed where summers are even shorter than ours.