Glenhighton Garden

Another Sunday, another garden visit under Scotland's Garden Scheme. This time to Glenhighton , which is south from us and not too far away. This garden is very much like ours heightwise (750ft to our 900) although it is much, much larger. It must be lovely to be able to roam around your own ground for hours. And we were very fortunate today as there was no rain (but also no sun, sadly) so at least we didn't have to carry a brolly although I took the precaution to wear my wellies!

There were some wonderful trees in this garden which started its life as a more or less bare hillside (in 1970) and like us the owners began the garden by planting wind cover which has been achieved and in fact some of the trees are now so large that have begun to overshadow the garden so thinning will be in order before much longer. The trunk above belongs to a Betula Alba chinensis (there was another latin word after that but we could not decipher it. The texture of the bark was stunning.

Despite what you might think these trees are most definitely alive and kicking but all their greenery was hidden at the top. Down below in the darkness they looked bare and wintery but their beauty still impressed me deeply while wandering through the part of the garden known as the Woodland Walk.

Glenhighton has enough variety to satisfy the most demanding garden visitor. In addition to the woodland walk, there is a fire pond and also a lake around which you can wander. To top it all it has an island in the middle as well as water lilies aplenty which sadly weren't out, but just seeing the reflections was beautiful despite the ever present midges which feasted on my blood (I must be tasty, they tend to leave John more or less alone!).

Even though we have poppies in our own garden there aren't so many together yet (I'm working on that!) so I simply had to take a picture as well as a very close-up macro shot. I'm not usual feeble minded about which picture to choose as my blip but today I just could not make up my mind at all between the poppies above, the bare trees seen further up from that and the picture at the top with the foxgloves, the fly sculpture and the luscious greenery. After reading Lenna's blog about green, I went with that!

But in my heart of hearts, this poppy picture does it for me in lusciousness, colour and texture. However I am saving one of my own poppies to blip like this in future.