First day of the hols

This holiday is not about the weather. Just as well because the forecast for the next week is not promising. The focus of the coming days is to relax, read, walk when the skies lift, and just be in this lovely place.

We have always been lucky with the weather on past trips to Colonsay. But you don't really know a place until you experience all its moods, and to do that we needed to see leaden skies, lashing rain, whipping winds and scudding clouds. We've seen all of those today (plus a few gleams of faint sunshine), and the rain started this morning while the dogs and I were walking through the outer gardens of Colonsay House. One of my favourite places, and I have been looking forward to that walk since last April! It did not disappoint. But first, cast your mind back to springtime when the giant gunnera, on the edge of the neglected water garden, looked like this.....

and now it looks like this!

Leaves so gigantic that a sense of scale is immediately checked, and I feel like a Borrower, or even as small as a ladybird. These leaves are simply gigantic and a lot of them have been fallen by the atrocious weather which has swept through the island over the last week.

One of my favourite plants in the outer gardens of Colonsay House is the very large leaved Rhododendron macabeanum. This rhododendron comes from India, but it seems to love these gardens and has seeded all over the place since first planted in the 1930s. The leaves are glorious and I find them quite bewitching. This wood is a magical place!

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In a vase on Monday - colour

The intense colours in my vase this week come from nasturtiums, sweetpeas and a single glorious zinnia! Their beauty and love of life speak for themselves and need no further words from me! Enjoy!

Coastal walk from Gullane to North Berwick

By the time I have walked about four miles, my toes are screaming at me - it's the arthritis, you see. One of the joys of being that little bit older than I was. However, for a long time, I have been keen to walk along the beaches, and follow the coastal path, between Gullane and North Berwick. So, having worked out the tide times, I decided today was the day, and off we went. Below is our starting point, the bay at Gullane. It's a lovely beach, very popular with dog walkers. This is looking east, the direction Tilly and I were going to take. Looking back, up the Forth, the unmistakable bulk of Arthur's Seat, and Edinburgh's skyline, just clear enough to see. For most of the walk, there is the choice between wandering along a series of beaches, or following a path along the top of each. There's no denying it, at heart I am a shell-seeker. I have loads of shells at home. We lived on one of the out islands in the Bahamas for a just over a year, a lo

Possibly the last post and a sizzlingly hot vase on Monday

The border in our tiny garden is in an in-between phase at the moment and not very colourful, but elsewhere there are pops of high summer colour and I have brought them together in my vase today. The running wave uses Blogger as it's vehicle and they are changing the way a post is created but unfortunately I cannot make the new format work. I can't progress beyond the title! I cannot navigate to the main body of the post to create text. The new template has no prompts for adding photos, weblinks, to format the text, change font etc. It may be my old MacBook that's as fault but I can't do anything about that!! Are any other IAVOM bloggers who use Blogger having the same problems? I have tried, three times, to contact Blogger through their 'Help' prompt and received no feedback or contact whatsoever. This post is using the old 'Legacy' format, which no longer permits any kind of formatting of text, and so after four attempts I have finally manage

the running wave

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