Narcissi everywhere in the garden.

One solitary snowdrop which has suddenly appeared by the fence – I’ve never seen one in our garden before and actually there aren’t that many in this area.

Some pretty flowers which grow in the drive every year and which someone told me were windflowers.

Also – just as I had given up on them – the slimies (frogs) have arrived in the pond as usual and are mating away like crazy.

Having said this, as quickly as the grass grows, the flowers come back too. There’s also lots of our garden where we just leave the long grass to flourish, and that is a veritable haven for wildlife. Just as I was putting the lawnmower away yesterday (it is a powerful, heavy petrol mower which it needs to be to cover the lawns we have here), a small brown toad about the size of a 50p piece tried to hide underneath it and had to be gently rescued away into the long grass where it waddled away (for anyone who doesn’t know – the way you can tell the difference between frogs and toads is that frogs hop but toads walk).

Here are some of the flowers in the garden at the moment.

Laburnums in full flower

Cherries starting to form

Wild orchid near the pond

Water Lilies coming out of bud

Wild rose bush

Our pond

This is all well and good but it is really too hot here at the moment and I could really do with an afternoon of genuine Argyll rain (don’t tell the tourists I said that though).

Unfortunately I also notice that a holly bush we have in the garden has set out a lot of seedlings which are also sprouting on the patio. I’ll definitely have to get them weeded out otherwise we will have a forest growing there before we know where we are.

It’s been the most fantastic weather here for the last few days – the guy from Asda who did my delivery today told me that it was the first time in seven times he’d been here when it wasn’t raining. Actually the first year we lived here it seemed to rain every day from when we moved in during October and March the next year. The cats are greatly appreciating the sunshine at the moment….

Not so sure about the crocuses coming up at our front door however. Last year they were just opening up when some creature ate half of them and snapped the heads off the others. I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect one of our many resident red squirrels.

We still have some nice ones in July though – the hydrangeas are looking lovely, as is the buddleia. I’d always thought of the latter as very good for wildlife – though apparently it is less good than I had thought as under some circumstances it can actually be detrimental to butterflies by out-competing native plants which provide food for butterflies in their larval stages (R got this from BBC – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28196221). Anyway – it smells lovely and the bees are all over it. We certainly are not short of bees here which is good.The water lilies are still magnificent as well – even though I say so myself I’ve never seen such fantastic ones in a private garden before.

Today’s pictures also seem to incorporate Schrodi who took a bit of time off hunting to meet us at the gates when we came back from our walk. He is an absolute devil for mice and voles at the moment – on average he is bringing in at least two a day. Yesterday I picked a jumper up off the floor and discovered an (unhurt) baby vole underneath it. I picked it up in both hands to rescue it and then discovered that I had shut the door behind me and couldn’t open it again without releasing the vole. While I was yelling for R – who was quietly oblivious listening to music in his office – the vole was desperately trying to escape by repeatedly biting my fingers – luckily it was too small and young to make much impact. When I finally got R to open the door I released the vole in the garden and it shot off at a rate of knots – hopefully the wiser from its near-death experience. And the same afternoon Tora got in on the act by bringing in a large (dead) field mouse….