Wild Pansies

Every year, as soon as this field has been cut, tiny wild pansies spring up along one edge of it! Somehow they manage to survive the herbicides, pesticides and fertiliser and come back year after year in the autumn.

This year the crop was barley. That's now been combined, the grain gathered in and the straw baled. The field was also under sown with grass, so now with the warm weather we're having in these last days of summer it is getting a good chance to put on a bit of growth.

This evening we were out at a garden club talk given by Martin Carruthers, a archaeologist from the University of the Highlands and Islands in Kirkwall, about a local iron age dig. Absolutely fascinating! Nothing about gardening, just an incredible insight into the way of life of other islanders from thousands of years ago. In the 1980s, before the latest investigations started, I used to live a stone's throw from the site, which made it even more interesting. What has been determined already from the digging and the finds is amazing, but even more so is the amount we don't yet know.