Category: The Natural World
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Just in time for a perfect bloom
Not that the week gone by was hard, but I thought, and felt, that I’d put in a fair amount of physical effort. So we were looking forward to a couple of days quietly tending the potted plants in the New Galloway garden. But had there been sufficient rainfall to keep them alive? The rose…
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From lake to loch . . .
A week ago I stood on the shore of Lake Ahmic in northern Ontario (the near north, as my father liked to say, south of North Bay on Lake Nipissing, north of Barrie), and said goodbye to the loons, a perennial favourite of my mother. A couple of days ago we sat on a strategic…
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The lovely names
The lovely names I tell myself my mother would have loved to hear the names of the wild flowers we’ve met: stichwort; snowberry; loosestrife; sea thrift and speedwell; woundwort; red campion meadowsweet; big trefoil; celandine; kippernut; angelica; bugle I really don’t know if she would, if she would have enjoyed the new names rolling around…
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Very wet today . . . lovely!
A couple days ago I clocked a column headline that gave me pause, and this morning I returned to Ian Jack’s piece and read it carefully. He explains, with some precision, why we need a new story about the ‘glorious’ weather construct that we put on sunny days. To which I would add, after a…
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The shock of discovery
I often find myself dropping down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole on my various researches. Sometimes I’m shocked, and that shock brings, I must confess, a frisson of delight. Wow, I think to myself in the idiom of my early adolescence, that’s amazing! Or scary! Or embarrassing! Whatever, it’s the shock that stimulates. Today…
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Clouds of Dame’s Rocket
But the clouds of blossom are so enchanting, and apparently its evening scent so complements the visual delight, that perhaps we can forgive this dame’s rocket for its rampant colonising along the river bank. I love the appearance of these wild flowers at the bottom of the track. Up in our own little patch, we…
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Ineffable delight of the alpine orchids
Orchids seem so exotic, and possibly because of that it’s a wonderful pleasure to find them growing wild on our own little patch of Eden. On such a sturdy flower spike, or inflorescence, put out by the broad-leaved marsh orchid that’s found an excellent habitat in these upland fellsides, upwards of 40 separate blooms cluster,…
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Six grasses and two cuckoos
We began with the hairgrass, and eyes opened to new possibilities, proceeded to identify five more species of grass along the marshland twirl. Thanks iPlant/PictureThis. Common velvet, meadow foxtail, false oat grass, reed canary grass and rough bluegrass. And many of our stops interspersed with competing cuckoos calling for a mate. The marshland feels like…
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The humbling grace of time
We made an unhurried trip to Kirkcudbright yesterday afternoon to visit the monthly Producers’ Market there, and then after acquiring our consumables (heath honey; cheese melt; basil plants; sea weed and juniper smellies; beer), we ventured into the Kirkcudbright Galleries across the road to see the Galloway Hoard exhibition. But it was only much later…
Roads to Joy 