A beautiful garden on the outskirts of Oban: Glencruitten House Walled Garden

Yesterday, after much coaxing by one of my neighbours who works up there, I visited Glencruitten House Garden. What a beauty!

 

 

 

A visitor

This afternoon I very nearly stepped on this wee visitor to my drying green:

 

The toad was well camouflaged and sat in among the tallish grass. I coaxed it away from the centre of the grass towards the hedge. Is it the same specimen that I surprised in my flower bed about a year ago? It was wedged between an upturned flower box and the wall. Didn't have my camera with me that day.

A summer Sunday on the West Coast of Scotland

Hiya again
Had a fabulous warm and sunny Sunday last weekend in one of the many beautiful gardens that dot the West Coast of Scotland.
The purpose of my visit, in the company of a lovely Oban friend, was to represent our Lynnside Community Garden at the Lorn Horticultural Society's Flower Festival. The afternoon was a great success – it didn't hurt that the weather was absolutely perfect.
Thank you to the hosts, Mr & Mrs Charles Struthers, for having us.
If you read this and if you're in the area, Ardmaddy is definitely a must, whatever the weather. The location is stunning, the garden a gem.
But here are a few impressions of last Sunday:

Just to prove that the sky was absolutely cloudless. Not my best photo ever, I'm afraid.

Some of the produce from our garden, all freshly picked in the morning. It was quite a job to keep things fresh and looking nice.

The Lynnside Community Garden table and display.

Some flowers from our garden.

The landlord calling out winning numbers at the raffle draw towards the end of the day.
Thank you for visiting. Come again soon.
Peace!

Another first

My very first proper harvest of gooseberries. I bought a young shrub in spring and planted it in a tall terracotta pot. It seems to like it there.

A day of spring, a day of rain...

Hiya again
Yesterday was one of the best days yet this season: balmy, a fait breeze that dried the sheets on the washing lines, the neighbourhood ringing with the sound of a chainsaw and, once that had fallen silent, filled with the voices of birds and of children enjoying their first proper day off school... Fairly peaceful.
I was raised in Protestant Switzerland where Good Friday is one of the holiest days of the year, meaning that pretty much everything comes to a standstill. So it's still a bit of an experience to find that on the West Coast of Scotland Good Friday is a day like just about any other: the post is delivered, shops are open, people hang their laundry out to dry if the weather is good.Well, being an agnostic who no longer cares about church festivals, I appreciate shops are open so I could make the most of a lovely day by taking myself to the nearby garden centre, which has been holding a sale.

I bought three tall terracotta pots for less than £10 each, as well as plants to go into them (3 for the price of 2), and bags of compost (4 for the price of 3 -- I'll be in compost for a good while!). The pots now adorn yellow patches in the drying green. The patches are the result of the next-door neighbour's white boxer peeing again and again and again through the wire-mesh fence. I spoke to its owner but she shrugged it all off, saying it cannot be trained, which is rubbish! Mind you, I quite like her so I wasn't going to make a fuss.

(photo taken a couple of days later, on 4 Apr 2010, when the sun was out again)

We'll see whether the new arrangement will make a positive difference. I hope so.
The pots contain one red gooseberry and two raspberry shrubs. I will have to build some sort of support for the rasps, eventually, and some kind of shelter to keep them out of the worst of the north-easterly that sometimes comes bearing down the glen with a nasty, cold bite.
Still, I feel well pleased with myself for having brought this project to some sort of conclusion. There are too many still hanging about unfinished (the yellow shed, for one, which I have been meaning to paint a yummy purple -- it will happen, promise).
In stark contrast to yesterday, today has been grey and wet and quite cold.
Some neighbours in this terrace if not in this close toss pieces of bread out into the drying green. They have been attracting large jackdaws. I managed to capture two of them through my closed window this morning:While I love their plumage that shimmers green and blue in the sun, I'm not sure they are the kinds of birds we want in our gardens, where I've lately been observing the odd wren, several bluetits and a couple of robins.

Sunflowers, again

Hi there, I'm back with some photos from my mini-garden.

Funny how sunflowers can look just as startled as people -- I'm beginning to understand why cartoonists use them so much...

I took the above photo one very early morning and the camera decided to flash at the still sleepy flower, poor thing.
My mini garden looks decidedly bedraggled now, although there's a very healthy tomato plant muscling in and pushing almost everything else out that was growing in its big pot. On the photo above, it was still just a wee thing and I wasn't sure whether it was going to thrive. Will have to take a new photo soon to show you just what I mean.

This is what my second sunflower looked like about three weeks ago -- looking splendid. If the photo looks tilted it's because I held the camera as far away from me as possible, reaching out over the balcony railing to see the flower's 'face'.

Sadly, I'm not even sure whether the flower has since had a chance to ripen. We've had warm but very humid weather and it may just have gone into mildew mode. And the wee birdies that pecked away happily at this one's older sister have not been back. Perhaps they've already flown south. If so, that would probably mean another long, cold winter like the last one.