Summer arriving

A quick visit up to Glen Head and a sighting of the Great spotted woodpecker that is often to be seen at Duncan & Ellen’s bird feeder along with the many chaffinch, blue tits, great tits and siskins. Since the week of sunshine and now the rain, the vegetation has exploded into full green bloom. It’s the time of the ferns now, when I arrived the daffodils took center stage, along with opposite leaved golden saxifrage making lovely yellow green carpets and primroses and wild garlic adding to the colour and aroma. Then the purples arrived with the bluebells and bugles, now it’s very much the rainforest of the west. Trees in full leaf making a mosaic of greens and copper beech browns, splashes of white from the rowan https://winters.com/ambien-10mg/ flowers and the bright purples, mauves, reds and lilacs of the rhododendrons making it all feel a little bit Himalayan. The ferns are fantastic, male fern, lady fern, the crimped edges of the broad buckler and swathes of bracken, in places growing so thick and much taller than me. The Gunnera plants, originally found in South America are now in full glory as well, with the gigantic umbrella sized leaves adding a bit of Brazilian flamboyance to the Torrisdale verges. These plants have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria, this provides the plant with fixed nitrogen and the bacteria with carbon in a similar way to other nitrogen fixing plants such as clover, other legumes and alder.