BurnedThumb

June had its moments – between showers.

This is British hogweed, not the giant Japanese stuff. It looks quite airy and delicate, and has nice seedheads in the autumn.

There are whole stands of this stuff growing along the riverbank –

It’s comfrey, a plant which is not only brilliant for gardeners, providing a potash-rich mulch for tomatoes, but had many medicinal uses in the past. A wiccan herbalist friend of mine reckoned that it was a survival from the days of the Abbey, which might be the case. Augustinian Canons elsewhere had a very good reputation as healers, growing herb gardens and building hospitals within the monastery complex.

This year the wild roses are spectacular. I don’t remeber ever seeing them so prolific.

Most of the nestlings are fledged now, though I notice that the sparrows appear to be trying for brood number two. The exceptions are the black-backed gulls, whose fat fluffy brown chicks are walking all over the roof of the warehouse their colony has nested on. I’m not looking forward to them taking off. The adults are big, noisy and aggressive and the colony has doubled since last year. I know magpies have a bad rep for killing things, but they are nothing compared with gulls. On Orkney I saw a black-headed gull stoop and lift a plover chick out of a nest without the slightest effort or hesitation. All the meditation on the circle of life and gulls have chicks to feed too doesn’t always cut it when you see the bereaved birds circling ad screaming and trying to chase the predator away!

This is fairly irrational I know. I was delighted to find an owl pellet on the parapet of our bridge, but the owls could have eaten all sorts of creatures I’m fond of. And as for the seal I saw going down the river with the tide – that was pure joy, although it could have destroyed untold fish stocks as it came upstream. But there it is. I find some of my wild neighbours easier to live with than others!

Everything grew tall and lush while we were away, and the flowery places have filled up with colour.

The first roses are coming through, and the yard beside the house is full of scent from these albas, and the white sweet rocket that is in behind them.

In the greenhouse, it doesn’t seem to have been so cold.

Even the pond has brightened up!

Of course there is the weeding to do, herb cuttings to take, and broccoli, leeks and kale to plant out, but we had the first gooseberry fool on Sunday from our own bush. It was fabulous!

Last week was all about stones. Nest spaces, cairns, brochs, walls, scree, cliffs, standing stones, hearth places, earth houses, burial chambers.

And birds, including arctic skuas, which I’d never seen before, and several daylight owls. It was cold and wet and sometimes windy. There will be many stone poems.

Last week’s starlings have found their wings, and now they are all over the garden like joy-riders, scaring the wits out of the magpies, who are behaving more like grumpy old men than the ruthless predators they are reputed to be. Their own babies, however, hatched last week and they’ll go after anything. I saw one trying to crawl into a roofspace after a sparrow’s nest.

Bluetits, blackbirds, sparrows and dunnocks seem to have hatched too. There are fluffy exuberant birds everywhere, trying to eat anything that will sit still long enough, knocking each other over, squawking and jeering at each other from the telephone line or the hedge. It’s like being on playground duty again.

Here is my Vincent border. For about a fortnight it looks fabulous.

This is sweet rocket. When I first planted it, it was this lovely violet colour. The next year, it came up white, which looks and smells fantastic in the evenings. And for the last two years, we have had one recurrence of the violet.

Grey June
Grey June twilight now.
Rocket scents the still garden –
cinnamon and dew.

Now it is raining, and cooler again. The garden came on a lot in the sunny weather, but the courgettes and pumpkins I planted and the french beans I sowed will be glad of the wet weather – if it doesn’t go on too long.

Summer Rain
When the long drought ends,
rain kisses dusty windows,
whispers on the roof.

All the aquilegias came out – they are a weird and wonderful mix. Every year I think I will save seed of the prettiest, but they just do what they like anyway.

May EveningAir quivers with rain.
The Ochils hide behind
walls of new leaves.

Since that evening, the rain has stopped, the sun has come out, and the forecast for the week says gardening.

There is much more green about. A nest full of starlings fledged while I was hanging out the washing. I could hear a lot of noise from the telegraph wire and noticed two adults apparently shouting “Jump!” into the tall cedar tree where they (and almost every other bird in Stirling, including some magpies) nest. And then the baby birds jumped, with a desperate flap and flutter that sudenly gained smoothness and accuracy as they realised what wings were for, landing beside their parents and immediately demanding a reward.
I don’t know how so many birds survive the proximity of the magpies. Maybe they are maligned. The next time there was a racket from the nesting tree it was mostly the magpies who were making it, although every bird in the garden joined in, chasing off a very large crow.

All the fruit bushes are in blossom, and there are berries setting on the gooseberries and strawberries.

The greenhouse is mostly doing well, but these tomato plants look extremely odd. Does anyone know what’s going on here?

May Evening

Last week was mostly cold, mostly wet. The two bright spots were the greenhouse, where everything is maturing nicely, even the courgettes and pumpkins coming through when I expect them, and the goldfinches. A few months ago I moved my desk into the window so I could work in the light, and it has been the best thing I could have done.

I have watched as the hills changed from stone-grey to green to gorse yellow, and finally disappeared into a blue haze behind the leaves of the windbreak trees. I’ve watched the blossom in the orchardwax and wane like moonlight. I’ve seen my neighbour give his lovely birch trees a brutal short-back-and-sides, and I’ve watched the goldfinches hanging out, too high up to be obvious at street level, but perfectly visible to me as I sit in the dormer pretending to work. There are so many of them, which surprised me, as I thought they were only occasional visitors. They are doing very well in suburbs, apparently, because so many people put out niger seeds specifically for them.

I meant to post this picture earlier this week. It was taken on Sunday from Ossian’s Hall, at The Hermitage, near Dunkeld. We’d been up that way to visit the Loch of the Lowes, where we got a glimpse – just the top of her head showing above the nest – of the famous Lady, who is incubating three eggs at the age of twenty-five – a phenomenal age for an osprey. It’s a lovely visitor centre, and the staff are really helpful, chatty and informative. They have a blog too, which you can see here, which is well-written, and updated often.

Ossian’s Hall is a big imposing kind of folly, redeemed only by this fabulous view. But just up the track is Ossian’s cave, which is much more the thing. I’m not sure quite how my mind was working on Sunday, because I was too bowled over by this little gem to take a photograph. But it’s like a cross between a hobbit hole, curved roof, merged into the hillside so you can hardley see it, and with tiny windows out to give glorious views, and the very best kind of child’s gang hut.

I loved it, but not as much as I loved the longhouse we saw just outside Killin. This was inhabited by a family until 1968, and is being conserved (not restored) by the National Trust. It has living accommodation at one end and a byre for the cattle at the other.

This is the roof of the byre. It’s a simple, quasi-primitive structure (but I am beginning to think that what we call primitive is actually very highly-adapted and refined to the needs of the place, and we don’t recognise it because we like things complex and versatile, and reflecting our fantasies).It reminded me of the farmhouse at Stong in Iceland which they’ve dug out of the tephra from a volcanic eruption in 1763, and of old farmhouses in Ireland, so often replaced by sprawling ranch-type villas in the Celtic Tiger years. I got a sense of the continuity of earth-wisdom which so many people have evolved over years of living and loving the place they live in. I can feel a poem coming on.

It was as we parked here that we heard a cuckoo. It’s been years since I heard one of them.

And since Sunday, this week has been full of rain, but there was a swift flying over the garden as I filled the kettle for breakfast. I hope it has brought some higher temperatures with it.

This isn’t our appletree. It belongs to our next-door neighbour. We don’t have fruit trees, which I think is a pity, but it’s great for everyone else, because we are the ones you can give your surplus to, and we are very grateful. It’s cherry blossom time too, and there’s a whole avenue of pink frilly trees just across the river. They are right on time – thirty years ago tomorrow they were just like this the day we moved here from Edinburgh.

Yesterday we went to Inchmahome to look at the bluebells. It was just a bit too early for them,

but not for the violets.

There was an osprey too, circling over the Lake of Menteith, and the first swallows of the summer. I haven’t seen any here yet – it’s late for them and I expect the bad weather further south is holding them up.

Back here in the garden I’ve been catching up with the weeding and adding to the herb patch. There are some new plants of bergamot and sorrel, and the mint has has a makeover. In the greenhouse I’ve sowed marjoram, fennel, basil and coriander, as well as courgettes and pumpkins. It gets very warm in there, although outside the wind is cold and there was frost on the roof this morning.

In the fruit bush area, the gooseberries are setting and the strawberry plants are beginning to bulk up. I don’t suppose there will be too much fruit this year, but they’ll be gathering their strength for next summer.

I didn’t get out and about much last week, what with the showers and with not being very well.

While I was in the house, out in the territory, spring was getting busy. Almost all the trees are in leaf, that burning intense green (with undernotes of copper and yellow) that is almost a cure for all ills by itself. Only the ash and the beech are still lagging, and there are flower buds on the rowan and hawthorn and elder. This flower

makes its presence felt more and more along the river banks as well as in our pond, and the tulips are at their elegant best.

There’s less success among the vegetables. There are shoots of early peas and potatoes, but there’s no sign of carrts or beetroot, and the salads were no sooner up than they were eaten. There are birds nesting in all the hedges and shrubs, and while the blackbirds are sitting on eggs, the sparrows are feeding their first broods.

This last photo is one I took in our local Waterstones. Loads of people I know have gone in to see it really sitting there – between Rimbaud and Scott – so I hope someone buys it to make it worth the shop’s while!

After the warm lovely days, came frost and snow and hail. Somehow, things kept on growing.

We had Easter with all our children and our grand-daughter.

Then several of us got sick. In the north-east, a sudden spell of harsh weather in spring is sometimes called a ‘gowk (or cuckoo) storm’. When it’s over you know that spring is established, and summer is on its way. The first apple blossom is happening now, and the avenue of ornamental cherries is just beginning to shake out its pink frills, but today the wind is in the east, and I spend time by the fire, waiting for my energy to come back.

Soon! Soon!

February

The curlew’s first spring song
rises from the mud, faint as river mist.
Like dragon-fly wings it strengthens,
brightens in the budding sun.

A bit late – it needed a bit of tidying up!