While I was taking a few minutes respite from hard yard work (shhhhh, not a word to the boss), I noticed our female blackbird, Mabel, who is as tame as can be. She had a bath in the mini pond and started preening herself, as I’ve seen her do many times. Then she got herself a really sunny spot, lay down on the grass and spread her wings for all the world like she was sunbathing. She’d folded her wings again by the time I managed to creep up on her for this picture.
Mabel sunbathing.
You’d have thought that a glass of Munguin’s special reserve might have been in order… but the likes of me got a bottle of water. At least it was Scottish water!
All sorts of places for small animals to hide in the garden. Unfortunately for him, Tris is not a small animal!
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
No pictures Tris? My phone?
Gerry P
Sent from my iPhone
>
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Working here, Gerry.
Anyone else?
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I get no pictures on i phone, I pad or I mac? Strange.
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Oh damn…
I’ll do it again, Gerry.
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Is that working now Gerry?
Unfortunately all the spacing has gone to hell, but hopefully the pics are there
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Yep, pictures ok now.
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Ah relief… Thanks for letting me know, Gerry.
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Nice tattie in the last pic. Solanums are so diverse, they include tomatoes, nightshade etc.. Crispum or Chilean potato bush is a real value for money shrub. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Oops better watch, I’m in danger of getting told off by Niko for being a sad anorak given that he’s so cool of course.
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He certainly is!. A cool anorak!
I was trying to remember the name of that plant. Chilean Potato, or Solanum.
I’ve got two forming an arch over a path and in a good year they are a joy of colour. I also had a white one, but it didn’t do very well.
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I’ve never grown the white one, maybe it’s a bit less hardy and that’s why it’s not so common. It’s a plant that will grow in almost any soil but seems to favour neutral onto alkaline. Most of our soil is acid to neutral but I don’t think soil type would be the reason for a lack of success. Like most plants from that region though, they do like a lot of water. They’ve got to compete for light in the wild but water is plentiful so they’re not used to working for it. Try the white one again if you want but keep it well watered until it gets a grip then I’m sure it will thrive.
If you keep an eye out for suckers growing up from the roots of your shrub, you can dig them out and pot them up to get new plants.
Anorak mode ends.
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Lol. Thanks for the tips, G12.
They certainly are a joy and they flower for ages. Will give them a bit more water.
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Your garden is a masterpiece. It gets better every year. Mabel obviously agrees.
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Oh, thank you, Terry. Mabel certainly seems to enjoy it. I wish she’d talk Munguin into giving me a pay rise though 😉
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Lovely garden. I hope your neighbours appreciate the work you do even if Munguin doesn’t. I’ve bough a very sad looking lavender and celosia, in the bargain section, in the hope they revive in a bigger pot with fresh compost. The lavender might look sad but you can still get the scent when you rub the leaves. We’ll see if I’m as successful as you (spoiler – probably not!).
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Thanks you. Given them time, PP… and lots of love. They neighbours do like the garden, thankfully! 🙂
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The unknown shrub looks like a Jasmine, Tris.
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Thanks for the suggestion, Jutie, but it’s not jasmine (which I also love, but which always seems to die in my garden). It is a tuber… pops up in April, flowers and then goes back into the ground.
I’ll try to get some pictures close up of flowers and leaves. Maybe you’ll be able to tell better with a proper picture.
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Oh, I should add that the flowers smell almost citrus… lime maybe?
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What a lovely tranquil garden
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Thanks 🙂
It is a peaceful haven for me, Tatu.
A bit country garden in the town…
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Nice to see the pretty pictures of Munguin’s garden! (Which came through just fine on my PC, BTW.) Munguin’s gardening staff are to be commended. 😉
I like Mabel the blackbird too. She obviously enjoys the place.
Even the Scottish water looks good. In a grocery store, I recently saw some bottled water with a beautiful picture of a pristine snow-fed mountain stream on the label. Then I checked the fine print and saw that the source of the water before purification was the municipal water system of Fort Worth, Texas.
So the Scottish water may not have come from the Highlands. 😉
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I suspect they don’t get much snow in Texas… I’ll need to check Munguin’s Water Suppliers.
To be fair the water here is perfectly good, and it isn’t necessary to drink bottled water. But I love a sparkling water on a hot (for us) day.
I think all the animals like the garden. They’d like it much more if the neighbours didn’t have cats!
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We live in the countryside of Extremadura in Spain. We have three cats (and four dogs). We get lots of birds – Azure-winged Magpie, Hoopoe, Woodchat Shrike, Iberian Shrike, Red-rumped Swallow (the swallows come and drink and dip in our pool and fly amazing acrobatics), starlings, sparrows (they like to sit on the edge of the pool for a wee bath), little owl, barn owl blackbirds, robin, thrush… – all come to visit our “garden”. The cats watch but never attempt to catch a bird.
One of dogs loves to run from tree to tree barking at birds. The azure winged magpies tease her!
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I went on a bird watching holiday to Extramadura. The Azure-winged Magpies were brilliant. Much nicer than our arrogant variety.
We had a Catalan girl as our guide and she could drive the minibus and point out Little Owls hundreds of metres away while on the go. But we learned that she was looking for their favoured perching points and soon we were spotting them ourselves.
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Sounds like a great holiday, Dave.
I have to say I’m not keen on magpies here. They chase the smaller birds and hover round the nests. They are beautiful though.
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Sounds great. Looked at s,me pictures of the area there and it looks a lovely place with a great climate.
And it sounds like an animal sanctuary…
🙂
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I like purified bottled water in preference to the taste and odor of chlorinated tap water from municipal water mains. The fact that the source of the water may be the municipal water supply of the city where the purification and bottling plants are located is self-evidently irrelevant to the quality of the bottled water.
Of course the marketing people enjoy slapping pictures of mountain streams or pristine springs on the label which gives the environmental radicals of the far left the opportunity to charge deception and fraud. The lefties, having a thing about plastic bottles, invariably try to tell us that since it starts as tap water anyway, then tap water is “just as good.” They have either never actually tasted tap water and compared it to the taste of bottled water, or (more likely) are just lying about it in service of their concept of the greater good.
Having established that bottled water tastes better and that its source is irrelevant, I wasn’t able to immediately identify the source of Strathrowen Sparkling Water, which is labeled as “Scottish Mountain Water.”
I was however able to learn a little about Highland Spring bottled water. The Highland Spring company says that “Every drop of Highland Spring comes from the majestic Ochil Hills, where it is carefully drawn from protected land.” They have a nicely illustrated four part story and a pretty mountain picture.
https://highlandspring.com/natural-source
The Guardian says: “This Scottish brand sources its water from Perthshire, central Scotland.” And Wikipedia says: “It produces still and sparkling water at its factory in Blackford, Perth and Kinross, although despite the name this area is not actually within the Scottish Highlands.”
Anyway, the good news is that where the water comes from really doesn’t matter. It would be just fine if it came from the taps in Glasgow. What’s important is that for purposes of marketing, its label has something on it about a mountain or a spring. 😉
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PS: As for cats, they seem snooty about being destructive.
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They tend to be snooty about everything!
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Highland Spring is one of these faux Scottish companies. It would be an exaggeration to say I’d rather die of thirst than drink their water, but only a small one!
🙂
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Hmmm……I see that Highland Spring is now owned by a UAE billionaire.
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Aren’t most things?
🙂
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Danny, Glasgow’s tap water is superb, drawn from the waters of Loch Katrine in the Trossachs.
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Andi……Sounds excellent as a water source. My problem with municipal water systems that I’m familiar with in the states are that they are purified by a chlorination process. I don’t have any idea how that works, but it leaves a characteristic taste that is not present in bottled water that I’ve tasted.
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Tris……I posted a reply, but for some reason it showed up about five items below.
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I posted a reply to your comment about five items above, but it showed up down here. My post about looking down here for what should have been posted up there ALSO showed up down here. That’s why it’s down here instead of five items above, where it should be. 😦
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🙂
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WordPress, Danny… WordPress!!!
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Loving your choices. My favourite ‘Weed’ is your Welsh Poppy. Try the other Mecanopsis relatives for intense fluorescent blues to Pinks to mix in with your Cambrica yellow to orange..easy with a bit of peat in the soil..
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Thanks for the tip, David. I did try blue ones once, but they didn’t take… maybe not enough peat!
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Love your random garden.. Your *Welsh poppy is my favourite weed – sometimes comes away orange.. Try the other Mecanopsis for the same good vibrant colouring in blues through to pink. A bit of peat in the soil does it..
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Well, yeah, it’s very random. If something grows and it’s pretty, well, I just let it.
There’s lots of quiet little places for animals to hide. We have birds’ nests, bee colonies, and Micky and Jerry… and their families who live in the shes and consume vast numbers of seeds and nuts (and blueberry muffins).
All in all, it’s a happy place.
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Glad that Mickey and Jerry still have their fondness for blueberry muffins.
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Eat me out of house and home…
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Blackbirds “sunbathe” all the time in summer here.
If you have a birdbath/tray of water then they’ll alternate between splashing in water/stretching out on lawn. Its actually the opposite of sunbathing really – they’re trying to cool down but they need the wing muscles up to temperature quickly.
We had some starlings (unusual these days) in the garden this week – I had a sprinkler out on the back lawn (yes really its that dry) and the parents were teaching the young how to catch insects on the lawn. One of the young was much more interested in the sprinkler & eventually the whole “family” had a shower on the lawn which was quite amusing.
As usual I’m bloody useless when it comes to thinking about filming this until later 🙂
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We still have a lot of starlings in the garden here. They are greedy bad tempered and very loud, but, hey, they need to eat… and they eat more or less anything…unlike the fussy blackbirds who turn up their beaks at anything not specifically to their taste.
Mabel, the female blackbird, is so tame. But if I rake in my pockets for the phone to film, she gets spooked. And I never think about doing it till she’s right next to me.
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Sorry, been busy in my own garden so kept forgetting to post this. Your unidentified plant looks like Smilacina Racemosa. We grow it and you are right about the perfume – it’s glorious!
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Dammit, I just googled to check I had the spelling correct and see it has been reclassified but still plenty info under the ‘old’ name. I used to know all the Latin names of our plants but in our older years, Mr Stuck and I tend to wander round the garden going, “The dammit, what’s that called? looks in need of attention.”
Reclassification doesn’t help! 😱
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Ahhh… Got it. Thank you. Isn’t it gorgeous? The pity is that the flowers only last a couple weeks.
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