Category: Accidental gardener
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Pond Cottage nature notes – making a happy mess.
Too hot to do the outside work I had planned. I stay indoors with windows open to invite a cooling breeze while I tweak at words for next year’s Pond Cottage entry in Scotland’s Gardens Scheme 2026 Yellow Book. Is it right?
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Plants, pollinators, people: welcome to the Pond Garden
How to plan and plant for wildlife in our new climate of uncertainty? I’m searching for ideas in the era of adaptation. There’s great advice from experts but I can also learn a lot from close encounters with the pollinators feasting on self-sown flowers at Pond Cottage. Great opportunists. True survivors.
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Here’s to a new season of unruly gardening
Which season are we in, exactly? Looking through old blogposts it’s almost quaint to note how I marked the comforting rhythm of the four seasons. Four seasons? More like two now I often think: winterish and summerish.
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Wanted: a deep mulch of money
”Pond Cottage is an acreage of weed, rot and litter but Fay Young intends to turn it into a Scottish horticultural paradise”. That was The Herald almost thirty years ago in a quirkily offbeat introduction to my new dream commission: a Weekend Extra series about Scotland’s gardens and gardeners…
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Bye bye blackbird…and our Edinburgh urban jungle
Global campaigns sound alarms in a new age of mass extinctions – but local gardens can be sanctuaries, instead of parked cars there could be nature reserves at many more back doors.
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No garden retreat at Little Sparta
Order…disorder: “The present order is the disorder of the future.” Louis Antoine de Saint-Just 1767-1794 But it’s Ian Hamilton Finlay’s words that echo round the garden today.
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Welcome to The Pond
This is a new adventure for us but we are looking forward to welcoming visitors to our first autumn ‘season’.
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Fine weather for flamingoes?
Nature is the boss. At best we manage to infiltrate here and there with splashes of colour and dashes of ideas. Some of them even work out well. Check the flamingoes…
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Ad neverendum?
I loiter in the garden and find myself longing for this election campaign to end. And I’m not alone. Over the last few days I’ve been meeting people – politicians, academics and ordinary voters like me – desperate to see the end of #GE2015, as the Twitter hashtags identify this unseemly mess.
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Vertically challenged
It’s a dreary grey dawn but there’s a blaze of red outside the bedroom window and it’s twittering with sparrows all ready for the day. After a proper hot summer, the autumn display of our rampant Virginia creeper has never looked more spectacular but I have mixed feelings listening to all that bird life.
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Social climbers
Suddenly autumn has arrived on my windowsill and dumped a load of red leaves at the back door too. Hard to believe we once doubted the weedy little Virgian Creeper would rise further than the garden shed. Now it has not only reached our roof but it is working its way along the houses on…
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A purple picture is worth a thousand words
Maybe it’s a sign of my age, but I am getting quite a taste for purple.