A Fyne river

I took my camera with me when I went down to Linn Gardens today, at Cove, on the Clyde. This is the garden formerly run by my friend Jamie Taggart until he disappeared on a plant hunting trip in Vietnam last October. I always try for a non-garden Blip if I get out at all!

Jamie's father Jim is trying hard to keep the garden in some sort of order, but it's obviously an impossible task. A couple of years previously Jamie had gone to Vietnam for the first time and brought back a great deal of seed - along with all the other rhododendrons, ferns and miscellaneous other plants there are tens of thousands of seedlings growing on. Much of the Vietnam stuff is unknown and there are potentially many wonderful plants, but Jim is having difficulty trying to decide what to do with this surfeit of riches.

He decided to sell some of the identified plants which are there in abundance, so I came away with several fabulous Vietnamese Schefflera petelottii - large digitate-leaved shrubs - and a number of the amazing Blechnum palmiforme, ferns grown by Jamie from spores sent from Gough Island in the South Atlantic. These are already proving to be quite hardy down at Logan Botanic Garden, so I hope that they'll succeed at Arduaine.

On the way back I stopped off for a minute or two at the head of Loch Fyne and climbed down the bank to photograph the River Fyne as it flowed under the old bridge down to the loch. The new bridge is behind me. A beautiful spot.