The glen

We live at the bottom of a steep narrow river valley (the Scottish word is glen) in 57 N on the west coast of Scotland. Because of the Gulf Stream, this is not as cold as you may imagine - there are palm trees growing north of us. But we get a lot of rain and some snow. The weather is constantly changing as fronts move across the Atlantic. Here is a link to the weather in the Highlands. When we do get clear skies we have no light pollution (except the moon) and so get an excellent view of the stars. This link lets you predict what will be in your night sky.

Because we are a couple of miles inland, we are sheltered from the worst of the Atlantic gales, at least to the extent that we don't get salt spray. On the other hand, our glen acts as a wind funnel with the wind in some directions. This is good in that it reduces our problems with Highland midges, but bad in that the winter gales can be ferocious. There were two exceptonal gales in January 2005 (think hurricane). Our partly-built gazebo, with no roof to catch the wind, and a base only just liftable by four men, flew over 1.5m of wire fence and was trashed on the other side. However, we still have a roof, a conservatory, a water tank, a fuel tank and an undamaged car, and there are many others who can't say the same.

South of us, the land rises very quickly to over 700m. This means that we get no direct sun between the end of October and about the 3rd week in February. This may sound depressing, but we don't miss out on much because the short hours of daylight in the winter so far north, combined with the amount of cloud cover, reduce the hours of sunshine to very few in winter. In the summer, we only get a few hours of darkness. However, the foot of our garden only gets a few hours of direct sun even in the summer. Because we at the bottom of a valley, we are in a frost pocket. The lowest temperature we have recorded in the last couple of years is -12C. We also have snow sometimes, but not often very much or for very long.

All this makes for a challenging microclimate for gardening. The soil is fairly but not extremely acid, very stony, and fairly clay-ey - and the water-table is high.

Our garden is about two thirds of an acre surrounded by a field full of soft rush (Juncus effusus), sheep and occasionally cows. We aim to have small trees and large shrubs all around the perimeter to keep the red deer out, preferably thorny ones to discourage the stock from eating them. Otherwise, we won't have any dense shrubs, so as to avoid giving shelter to the midges. We intend to make a pond and also some more perennial beds. However, at the moment most of it is "laid to lawn" ie the original sheep paddock, mowed irregularly which has allowed a large, diverse and extremely beautiful collection of mosses and lichens to invade, somewhat to the detriment of the daffodils. We also have a lot of other native plants, which we are slowly beginning to record.

We see a wide range of wild animals, including some rare species. We have become rather fond of a large garden bird population which we feed with enormous quantities of sunflower seeds.

So....we have a wild garden, in several senses of the word. Well, a formal garden just wouldn't look right. And the pine martens might not visit it.

Our diary of our experiences with wildlife, plantlife, and geology, is kept online at 57 North.