The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Glorious gardens timeless
Three cheers – my lockdown locks are shorn, gone at last. It had seemed like a lifetime since I sat in a barber’s chair. I didn’t look quite such a shaggy dog as some of my chums, but what a feeling of renewal to see the tresses fall to the floor.
While we’ve been isolating at home these last months, sitting out in the garden in the good weather, the birds have got quite accustomed to us, and Inka, too, regarding us as harmless features of the landscape. Blackbirds and song thrushes usually have at least two broods each year and all day they drop into the garden to hunt round our feet for worms to feed their chicks.
From the continued activity we can see from the bedroom window, the sparrows have hatched a third brood in at least one of the nesting boxes. I watched a harassed grey wagtail relentlessly pursued by two of its fledglings jostling with each other to be first in the queue for food, fluttering their wings to stimulate the parent bird to feed them. It will be like that from dawn to dusk until the parent birds tire of it all and kick the fledglings out to fend for themselves
I don’t put out bird feeders at this time of year because there’s plenty of natural food in the countryside. Birds are opportunistic feeders and will flock to the feeders for easy meals for their demanding young. But chicks need the protein that they get from earthworms and insects and other wriggly things in order to develop.
Floral conundrum
Inka and I went a woodland walk we hadn’t gone for more than a year. I knew what I was looking for and, sure enough, not far along the track I found the patch of harebells I remembered, with the sunlight on them, shivering in the light breeze. Or were they bluebells? As ever, when faced with floral conundrums I reach for Mary McMurtrie’s invaluable book on Scottish Wild Flowers. The confusion only deepens. On the same page she illustrates the Scottish bluebell, or harebell, and the wild hyacinth, or English bluebell. The thistle is our national emblem, but the harebell
– or should it be bluebell? – surely characterises the imaginative and sensitive side of our Scottishness.
Sir Harry Lauder, embodiment of Scottishness, sang tenderly of Mary, his Scots bluebell, and you might think that the words of such an authority would end the matter. But the waters get muddied further when you buy a box of Scottish Bluebell matches (made in Sweden, please note), which has a spray of harebells decorating the lid.
In the early days of this column I got the most fearful rocket from a reader for suggesting that bluebells were Scottish. “I am aghast”, he wrote, “that someone in your position” – I’d only been in it a matter of months – “should consider bluebells in the same breath as harebells.”
I wrote back explaining it was what my Loanhead aunties called them. He was in no mood to be impressed by my aunties, but the experience was seared on my memory. With the passage of years, I can say now with confidence that the harebell has it. The definitive answer is surely in Mary McMurtrie’s description of their delicate blue bells hanging on threadlike stalks from a wiry stem. Is this not a metaphor for our natural resilience combined with delicacy and grace?
Day out at Crathes
It’s not been so easy taking days out here and there – as they say in Aberdeenshire. So when the Doyenne saw that Crathes Castle Gardens, near Banchory, had reopened, and as they are a long-time favourite, we reckoned it was time for a day out.
The 16th Century castle remains closed, but it provides the most stunning backdrop to the gardens. The four-acre walled gardens have been developed over 300 years and latterly were influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1920s. Established trees and shrubs and hedges add to the sense of permanence.
Everywhere is colour, which follows the seasons of the year.
We lost track of time and found we had spent nearly two hours immersed in colour and scent and the comforting hum of bumble bees. MAN WITH TWO DOGS