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.