The birds

For me, birds and gardening go together. I wouldn’t want one without the other. I’m lucky with this garden; there was already a well established population of residents and visitors when I arrived. The chaffinches dominate in the winter. Flocks of twenty or thirty individuals come dipping and chattering in, to sit in the rowan tree and fight over the feeders and bird table. The starlings are always around. They resemble a crowd of rowdy bikers, zooming into the garden with their black feathers gleaming like studded leather jackets. They screech to a halt at the table, toss whatever is on offer around and then rev up and leave at high speed for the next garden. Despite this bad boy image they are devoted parents and have successfully reared two large broods this year. The pic shows an adult with part of their first brood at the table in May.

Forget the hobnobs...

...the gooseberries are ripe mmmmmmmmmm crumble.

Learn to love a slug?

"Learn to love a slug." That's what one of the wildlife sites advises. Give it plenty of organic debris, like fallen leaves and flowers, and it will clean up your garden for you and be too busy to chomp the plants you value. Hah! My garden is not tidy. It is a morass of vegetation, some dead, some dying, some springing to life. At the moment there are foxglove flowers littering the ground everywhere. Do the slugs help to tidy them up? Do they weecht. No, they prefer to munch on my lovely violas. I have had one success though. I have been growing salad leaves in small troughs by the kitchen door. In an effort to deter the slugs I've been emptying the used coffee grounds into the troughs and around their rims and bases. The salad seems to grow quite happily through the mulch of grounds and the slugs have left them alone. Unfortunately so have I and now they have bolted everywhere. I should have let the slugs have 'em. Salad pah, you can't even deep fat fry it. If only chocolate hobnobs grew in tubs of compost.

(BTW I have only just discovered if you click on the thumbnail pics they'll open in to a larger image.)

Pretty things

Posting these pics I took yesterday because it's raining today, so I sat down to do some filing and organising of my finances and of course immediately started multi-shirking on the computer. I'm loving the lush greeness in the first tier at the moment. Another surprise rose has popped up. This time a scarlet show-off that clashes magnificently with the crimson rose from earlier in the week. The pansies have recovered from the slugs' attentions. They have been flowering steadily since March (when not acting as a slug salad bar). And finally a delicate clematis just starting to open at the steps to the second tier.

The view

I’ve mentioned the loch several times but it’s been like a silent character in a radio play, only there because I have spoken about it. So here it is, the view from the top of the garden and from the summerhouse.

In the garden this weekend

Let’s get back to the important things like birds, bees and butterflies. I think the first pic is a meadow brown on the hebe. It moved very quickly and I couldn’t get a look at the uppersides of its wings. There was also a red admiral around and a small tortoiseshell (2nd pic) but again neither stopped to feed for long. There doesn’t seem to be enough to make them want to stop in the garden at the moment. I think next year I will plant some cosmos and lobelia which, in my Tilly garden, used to attract hoards of tortoiseshells, whites and red admirals.

The third tier

The last post was far too long and boring so I’m going to gallop through the rest of the garden. Up the steps to the third tier, summerhouse on the right, which is slowly being stripped to the wood by effing wasps looking for nest building material; a decking area, perfect for sitting in the sun watching the loch; red gravel area, don’t know what the original purpose was but I was thinking of putting in raised veg beds, only problem is the salt wind which, when in the mood, blasts across the top of the garden. On the left, lawn and a higgedly-piggedly line of conifers whose burnt brown patches show they are not at all happy with the salt wind. Up another small flight of steps, more lawn on the left, small stream in upper left corner surrounded by nettles and brambles, more conifers. To the right a mossy flat, a large stand of hebes in the corner and a hugely overgrown leylandii hedge marks the right boundary.