Mid-summer

 The garden is ablaze with flowers - not all of them native. But this blog is about the native ones. The thyme in the rockery is suddenly in full flower. It is very attractive to pollinators.

So is the birdsfoot trefoil. 

The attempt to set up a miniature meadow, 2metres by 1 metre, has this year turned into more grasses with beautiful heads than flowers. However the ox-eye daisies have spread to the neighbouring flower bed, so vigorously that some of them have had to be weeded out. 

The goldfinches, perhaps the prettiest things in the garden, refuse to eat anything but sunflower hearts. Now that the shop has run out they have moved away for the moment. Our regulars - magpies, woodpigeons and sparrows - keep coming. Also we undoubtedly have a young family of starlings (there were none at all over the winter). On the other hand whereas we did have a pair of blackbirds over the winter we now have none at all. Perhaps their nest has been raided. Local predators include the magpies, a sparrow hawk, urban foxes and one or two cats. We have a high-powered water pistol to discourage cats, but it brings only the briefest respite.

One thing I hope the birds like, or will like as it grows, is the shrubs behind the pond. I did not call it a hedge, for it is so short, but it is getting a bit like one. The two sorts of wild rose have to be cut back.

Their flowers blew off yesterday, but we can expect lots of rose-hips soon. The brambles and the raspberries have just turned up, but they are very welcome, by bees as well as by us.

At the moment these plants seem to provide a lurking place for those cats I would like rid of. But such is normal life for the wildlife gardener.

365 Days Wild

 This is June, the month of 30 days Wild. What an excellent project that is. I am trying to identify a different invertebrate every day. So far I have exposed my hopeless inability to identify bumblebees - they won't stay still - and the utter impossibility of identifying the clouds of small flies passing up and down over a small stretch of the Water of Leith. I did triumphantly count two spots on a ladybird.

Meanwhile in the garden wild flowers are staring to blossom. So are non-native flowers, and they can be an important part of a wildlife habitat too, but they are not the subject of this blog. As soon as I established the little pond I bought some Water forgetmenots, Myosotis scorpioides.

I also bought some Water avens, Geum rivale. They, interestingly, have moved a little from where I planted them and are flourishing all the better for it.

Most interesting is a Ragged robin, Lychnis flos-cuculi. (Apologies for the poor photo.) This has turned up where none was sown or planted. I think it must have self seeded from one which I did have at the other end of the pond, where it was crowded out; and so I have moved it to another water feature (known as the ditch) which is not wilded. 

They are a plant I particularly like, I think from associations with childhood - one of the flowers my mum showed me.

Another of those flowers is the Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica. This has grown freely in the garden since before we bought the house. They grow prolifically as a weed - may well be a "garden escape" - and are removed ruthlessly from the rose beds.. But they are worth a place in any uncultivated corner.

One of the great pleasures of June, and of retirement, is sitting in the sun in the garden enjoying the flowers. If some of them are reminders of happy days in the country, that is surely a bonus.