Bluebells

“O where and O where does your highland laddie dwell;

He dwells in merry Scotland where the blue bells sweetly smell,”

In spite of the cold wind; the sunshine and showers over the last few days have turned the view from our kitchen window from a mass of green into a mass of azure blue. Yes, the bluebells in the traditional air, have at last shown themselves in abundance, in fact they are popping up in all sorts of places. Until this time last year when the builders were “landscaping” the grounds of our new house it was untouched grassland that had many years ago been the glebeland of the church manse. Top soil on the island is an interesting mixture, we are on volcanic raised beach which means stones and pebbles loosely held together with a fertile brown soil.

The builders had graded, added imported pebbles, oops I meant to write top soil, and generally stirrred the “soil” with a large JCB digger. Notwithstanding all this treatment the bluebell bulbs somehow survived and are now flowering successfully in unplanned places. The view from the window that I wrote about at the start of the blog, however, is a sort of planned area in that it is under trees where machines could not go, so an old and natural area loved not only by us but by a wide range of nesting birds, the odd rabbit or two but I hasten to add no highland laddie, yet!