We have been doing a small unscientific experiment. With the information that we should all dig up and burn our Spanish Bluebells as they are diluting the gene pool of the native Hyacinthoides non-scripta or Bluebell, instead, I have decided to relentlessly pick all the flowers and use them in vases throughout the house. It has proved a huge success and they have turned into their Hyacinth relations, as the photograph shows. 

    

I once grew a bulb available by mail order called Roman Hyacinth in preference to the usual disfigured type that people grow at Christmas, and was much rewarded with a more natural looking flower. When you live with a shrub grower who nurtures plants that can take years to grow, cutting flowers for the house is a highly controversial thing to do, and unlike my sister, who has specialised in growing plants that grow, flower and seed in the same year,I have slowly tried to introduce plants that will naturalise in sufficient numbers that we wont notice the odd bunch disappearing into the house for too short a time, only to end, languishing in the compost bin. Now I can add this beauty to my collection. Sometimes guests have laughed at me for picking really quite unstriking weeds like willow herb as a way of having flowers in the bedrooms just to save cutting our more showy garden flowers. I am only following the the tradition of Constance Spry. When asked to tea, the mother of our present neighbour was struck by a few stems of wild raspberry stuck in a vase in much the same vein as the restaurant I once went to in Shepherd Bush that had Docks in vases on every table. So our Spanish Bluebells will not be dug up and burnt, but instead ruthlessly picked, which I agree may weaken them over time, but in the meanwhile, the flowers wont be there long enough to do much damage to the native version and our house will smell of bluebells with flowers like hyacinths!

Random photographs of other flower arrangements.

An inconsequential record of a highland vegatable garden in spring.

For the first time we have decided to move outdoors this year. Having commandeered Norrie's shade tunnel in which he and his parents had nurtured their ever extending family of Rhododendrons, I re-covered it with plastic and started to grow leaves. Leaves; the one form of food that could transform our diet in the least space.Those of you who know me well may know that in my next life or my last I was or will be, a rabbit. Salad is my favourite food.
   
On December 8th 2011 we had a hurricane here and the poly tunnel, along with its plastic cover, flew to Aberdeen. We were then introduced to a sympathetic lose adjuster who helped me with the paperwork and eventually a new poly tunnel rose from the ashes of the massive destruction we suffered. A new, smart, tightly covered with proper doors type of poly tunnel, with rolling sides and ventilation control rather than the old sail flapping thing we had covered ourselves. It was erected by a Scotsman called Polanski which gave Norrie a bit of excitement thinking of films as he does most of the time. 
    
My vegetable growing continued to flourish with more and more leaves, some bought from the catalogue of my sister who is clever at finding new strains. We sampled more or less peppery versions of mustard and rocket and radish and are still slowly learning which varieties do well in our short season and cold climate.
  
Of course poly tunnel gardening accentuates the seasonal climatic conditions. In the winter the air is still and cold and damp and mildew proliferates. In the summer the heat can become intense and everything is capable of bolting within a week, so you start with a bountiful food supply and you end the seven days with woody stems and massive seed heads. Of course I cant bring myself to pull them all out because many look too sculptural for the hens or the compost heap and so the growing space gets smaller and smaller. This year I have a vintage Kale plant that must be two or three and each time it flowers and then goes to seed I cut them off and hang them up to dry with a fantasy of making Christmas decorations.
   
 Last winter we decided to make raised beds. Outside raised beds to grow ordinary vegetables to swell our larder of organic food especially during the winter. Having constructed robust boxes from offcuts provided by Sandy after Norrie has helped him with a day at his sawmill, they were filled with sandwiches of tasty things that plants like to eat. First, a very heavy dose of seaweed, decorated with beads of mussel shells and occasional rounded pebbles attached to straps of kelp, went in at the bottom. The contents of a large collection of black plastic darleks, or compost bins as Henry Doubleday would describe them, came next. When you eat as many vegetables as we do, and having been a Zero Waste Scotland volunteer, it is amazing just how much half rotted organic matter a household can supply. Along with all the envelopes and cardboard packing, we fill about ten a year. Much of the time they do little but slowly rot as the chance of aerobic digestion is slim in this cold damp climate and so it was with glee that we emptied them all as the tasty filling in our raised bed sandwich. The final layer was our own compost. As our garden is a woodland variety we have industrial quantities of leaves which we painstakingly rake up over the winter months of November to March. Made in huge bins and layered with all the cardboard the Ardgour Stores can provide, along with more seaweed and chicken manure, our compost is a heady mix of delicious nutrients once the ribbons of parcel tape and occasional piece of cutlery have been removed.
   
Having got this far, our excitement had to wait as the boxes remained swathed in, this time, black plastic; the remains of a roll of damp-proofing from when the house was restored.
Despite the occasional glance under the plastic, we knew there was no point starting too early. Instead, I satisfied my impatience by sowing rows of radishes under fleece in the poly tunnel; seeds that take seven days to germinate, so that I could monitor the soil temperature and appease my impatient nature.

Things have changed now. We had some warm weather over Easter and again today. Every morning I watched, hawk like, to see when the first broad bean popped through, only to be bamboozled by the odd rouge potato that has sprouted from over enthusiastic peelings and disguised itself as a broad bean. It took three days to tell the difference from neo potato and broad bean and there were three or four occasions when my excitement was dashed by yet another fake. Things are at full throttle now and growth is surging. Suddenly you want it to slow down, to savour every small change and enjoy each prolonged moment. That is not the way of living in the North. Seven months of hibernation are replaced by growth that seems to have taken hormone powder and all you can do is sit an enjoy every breath, allowing yourself to get catch on the incoming tide of green.

Dwarf Broad Bean, The Sutton

Radishes mark the rows of parsnips which take so long to germinate you are apt to forget and hoe them off in misguided enthusiasm.

The smokers sitting room.

29.4.14. The first Radishes,Scarlet Globe.

An evening walk

Whilst Norrie went to a barn dance for the opening of a local distillery, a new departure for this area and something for our guests to do, I stayed at home to welcome B&Bers who cancelled at the last minute. Instead, I went for an evening walk, something I do far too seldom
and here is what I saw:

Except to say that I also watched an eagle slowly swirling round a thermal high up over a summit ridge and a lone whooper swan who honked as he flew past me rather low, a mournful sound as if to say I am left behind and my family have flown north without me. 

23.4.56…..the most distinguished thing about me!

For my birthday Norrie took me to Sanna Bay and provided a wonderful picnic bought in Glasgow from the best food shops.

 The air was filled with the song of ascending sky larks and the gentle breaking of waves.

The Birthday Tart

In Love with Moss

I wrote this short piece some time ago (it must have been a year ago as I approach my fifty eighth birthday) and was reminded of it this afternoon as I walked to the top of the garden, sat on a bench and looked down Loch Linnhe and realised that it is the season of change. The winter pallet of subtle colour is replaced by a crescendo of growth that is so amplified when you live in the north. Five months of warmth, green and the buzz of bees before the first autumn colour will appear. From the washed out muteness of pale naples yellow and indian red, in a month or less, we will be assailed with greens of every shade, sprinkled with the stars of flower colour like hundreds and thousands on a cake, or more poetically, the stars in the sky. At last we have seen the stars in the last week or two, and more recently have been blessed with a huge golden moon. What a change from the endless grey and cloud cover we have had since November……much the same all over Britain I believe but stretching even the Highland lover we both are, to the limit none the less. But before the winter fades into spring and then the summer, I want to tell you about moss.

The colours found in moss are the strongest to be found during the winter months, and instead of walking past the miniature plants, more gripped by the larger forms of hill and tree, they become jewel like as if the detail of a medieval tapestry and you half expect a unicorn to trot into view.

In Love with Moss

           As a child I spent almost every school holiday at my grandmothers house in Scotland. There was an enormous garden. So enormous, in fact, that the fence was said to be two miles long.  A garden of that size is really a wilderness where in parts it is more cultivated than others. But the site and the trees and the planting by successive generations, not just of my family but by previous owners too, gives it a very established feeling. In places it is entirely natural and wild.

From quite a young age I spent much time in the garden, and as the eldest of five children, almost invariably alone but close enough to adults and “home” for it to be considered safe. Gradually, by degrees, I found a place that felt entirely sympathetic, safe and comfortable. It was at the foot of an oak tree where a small stream dropped by a number of miniature cascades down the slope between mossy banks and roots. I don’t believe that I had read The Borrowers or that anyone had read them to me. Indeed, I have a faint memory of finding the idea rather spooky and frightening! So, maybe, my idea borrowed nothing from them although it is clearly a universal one!

I remember lying on the ground, gazing at the trickle of water that dropped through the moss and stones, imagining myself to be small enough for the miniature cliffs and caves to be my whole world and everything lined with the indefinable green of moss, still to this day the most elusive and irresistible colour. The pebbles, wet in the stream bed, glistened and became enticing jewels of granite, quartz or mica just as they still do when walking on the beach. Without much imagination this became my “Fairy Land” and I longed to shrink to such tiny proportions that I could live there amongst the soft green colour. It is hard now to remember how I thought it would work. The gift of childhood enables fantasy and play rather like playing with a dolls house. But a house is an imitation of adult lives. I never played with a dolls house and don’t think I either had or wanted one but I dreamt of living outside, small enough to find shelter and warmth in all that olive green velvet that the moss became.

Now I am about to be fifty-seven in 2013 and after a life of vicissitudes, I am again in the Highlands. This time involved in the making of a garden myself. And the garden we tend faces towards the north with views of Ben Nevis glowering in the distance. There could not be a better environment in which to grow moss. And so I have come full circle and garden with a hand brush, sweeping old leaves and dead grass away from my tapestry of green where the need for other plants often feels superfluous.

    Yesterday was the first official day of Spring, known as the vernal equinox, so I am told by some departing guests. The light and the dark are in balance and from now on the daylight hours will be longer than the hours of darkness. I believe it the point at which growth is given the longer light to push up its vibrant green shoots and everything moves towards the hope and promise of a more peaceful season. However, for only the second time this winter, it began to snow just before dusk and as I drove a friend to catch the overnight train to London, we gazed upon a winter wonderland of birch trees whose twigs, rather than the vibrant cobalt purple normal in March as they are full of rising sap, were picked out in snow, making a tracery of twigs against a white sea and even whiter sky. 
    Usually when it snows, Norrie and I rush out and bicker about whose turn it is with the camera as we walk round the garden finding familiar detail in a new aspect, but this evening we were both busy and so an unusual event will have past in the morning unrecorded to share with you.So unusual is snow here in this garden that each time it visits we try to record its fleeting appearance but not this time so you will have to make do with ones we made earlier!