Photos by Ursula

Link

May flowers

We were at the Wood with Ursula last weekend; and she took lots of lovely pictures of flowers with her smart camera. We have chickweed wintergreen, lots of proper bluebells (hyacinthoides non-scripta, not the Spanish sort), violets, lousewort, milkwort and anemones both white and pink. Also wood sorrel, which Ursula spotted and I didn't. The bluebells have the true dark blue, accentuated by dark stems.They tend to impress as a sort of shadow, rather than a solid colour, which is what the more blowsy Spaniards do.

There are lots of rowan seedlings, so we instituted a search for parents, which we found quite far away at the eastern side, not far from the stream. There are also alders which I had not found before, most noticeably down at the bottom of the east burn. They are quite old, and I didn't see many cones on them; but as the photographs show, they have the distinctive alder leaf shape. Ursula noticed another oak on the far side of the east burn. I went on a walk right up the land over on the far side of that burn, a thing I hadn't done before; but I couldn't find any oak seedlings there. We now have five oaks.

Graham Tuley the noted tree man, whom we met on Loch Hourn a couple of years ago (he advises Kinlochhourn Lodge on forestry matters) had most genially agreed to come to lunch and look at the wood with a view to advising us on its management; but we arrived late on Saturday morning, and missed him. Black mark.

He looked around the wood without us, though, and he was kind enough to give some advice by telephone. He suggests we should spend a few seasons observing some marked seedlings, measuring them in the spring and autumn, to see if our presence in the wood is disturbing the deer enough to warn them off the seedlings. I suspect we are not there often enough at present to have much effect. Probably we will have to fence. He thinks we should have a try at establishing more oaks in the places where bracken and blaeberries grow at present, and also that we should try reintroducing Scots pines, of which there are none at present. He thinks they were there in the past, as chickweed wintergreen grows with pines.

He also said we should not cut down the dead tree trunks as there are woodpeckers in them. We went and looked and lo there were holes and places where woodpeckers had been after grubs. So maybe I shall use some of the dead trunks for growing things on.

Livy and Andrew's visit

Livy and Andrew go for a bike ride

In blazing sunshine and warm-enough-for-t-shirts weather.

PS Notice the new spring-like photo at the top of the blog :)

Flowers and ditching

Ditches and flowers

We went to the Wood last weekend, and were looking for signs of advancing spring. Perthshire was lush and as green as Fife. From Laggan, along to Spean Bridge, the green was not as bright, probably because of the altitude. At the Wood, things were still looking a little wintry, as there is a fair amount of dead bracken and molinia straw and the bog myrtle is still brown, but it was better than the upper parts of the A9 and the Spean Bridge road. The birches were green, though their leaves were still very small; the stubby grass was nice and bright and coming on well, and even the new molinia leaves were pushing up through the old straw. Some of the new banks and barrows around the house were beginning to green up in clumps.

Roy hauled more logs out of the bog, and then got usefully side-tracked into digging out part of the Allt na Minion. I went to look for flowers over by the west burn and in the wood. No chickweed wintergreen or orchids yet; but there are a few violets, plenty of bluebell leaves, lots of anemones, mostly white but some pink, and some bright pink self-heal. I saw one milkweed in the hither side of the bog, and one bluebell in the wood near the hazel. There are lots of tiny new birches and rowans which it would be nice to save from the deer.

The pond developing itself on part of the route of the Klarg pipe is quite seriously deep. I have decided to put a thoroughly alien gunnera there with yellow wild irises, skunk cabbage (which I saw growing wild near Seattle) and candelabra primulas. We wonder if there may actually be a spring there, supplying that persistent wetness. It may have been disturbed when rocks were dug up as the pipe was laid.

On Sunday morning, quite out of the blue, Donald Cameron arrived, along with Fred from Inchlaggan, with the digger. As I was writing this, he was working down the ditch beside the middle fence, hauling out great slabs of peat and vegetation, laying them neatly in the bog, bashing them down slightly to lay them flat. The idea is to drain the east side of the bog below the house into the Allt na Minion, and then to improve the course of that burn. The machine is too big to do a drain for the bit that I fell in up to the top of my boots in the snow; but Roy will do that with a spade.