Pantechnicon

Having sustained the bumblebee queens which were on the wing before any willow trees were in bloom, the Dandelions are now going to seed and feeding several Goldfinches. Meanwhile, I have begun Operation Dochan 2026, a task not dissimilar to painting the Forth Rail Bridge, though with less red led read led read lead red lead. As the canopy of dock leaves temporarily diminishes, I am left with two thoughts, one good, one bad.

The bad news is that there is also a profusion of Lady's Mantle, the non-native invasive species Alchemilla mollis, which if left unchecked might even give the docks some grief, as well as everything else.

The good news is that there are also many, many orchid rosettes this year. Oh joy unconfined! The front garden has not previously been particularly orchid-y, but this year looks like it will rewrite that history. Needless to say, there's no mowing occurring, save for a perimeter path and a gently-curving route from the little wooden gate to the proposed location for our new garden seat.

I don't think I have mentioned the garden seat adventure, have I? Adventure might be over-egging the pudding, but hear me out. Normally, we go on holiday in Megan's little car, it being the less old and infinitely more reliable vehicle we own. Indeed, until the day before the holiday, this was the plan. However, we were being a bit too angsty about packing and what to take on holiday and I casually said "Why don't we take the Volvo, because we can keep throwing stuff into it until we run out of stuff to throw into it and there'll probably still be room?"

Plus, it had just that minute come home from its latest trip to the menders, so what could possibly go wrong? In fairness to the Volvo, it didn't miss a beat for those two weeks, was an excellent wildlife hide, and had dual climate control so that Megan's side of the car was in a completely different latitude to mine.

Whilst in Blairgowrie, we noted that there was a garden nursery a scant twelve minutes' walk from the cottage, so one afternoon we pottered along to see what plants they had in stock which might conceivably survive in Orkney's unforgiving weather. We also noticed that there was a wide range of garden furniture for sale, and as we've been humming and harring about seating for sometime, we spent longer staring at the wood than the trees. Looking through their supplier's brochure, it became apparent that the seat we liked best wasn't in stock, so we asked at the checkout till how long it would take to get one in stock?

Sadly the answer of three weeks was longer than we were on holiday, but the staff came up with an ingenious solution. We wanted a love seat sort of thing, two chairs and a couple of shelves in between (principally for holding a parasol, I think, but that would be a non-starter in Orkney's breezes, and then we would still need to weigh down the top shelf with large glasses of alcohol, obviously). The nursery did have two of the correct chairs in stock, plus a second hand top shelf (slightly damaged) and a brand new bottom shelf (because the supplier had sent the wrong one to replace the damaged top shelf). Effectively, from these disparate pieces, they did have a whole love seat, just one they didn't think they would ever find a buyer for. They even offered to deliver it fully assembled (their local service was excellent), but when we explained that we would be transporting it back to Orkney and needed it in its component parts, the deal was nearly scuppered.

Thankfully, after a few seconds' thought, and the inclusion of an allen key in the discounted price, we realised that we could shove the chairs into the Volvo as they were, dismantle and store them at the cottage, before loading the whole kit back into the car (along with everything else) for the return trip home.

Couldn't have done that with a Ford Fiesta!