Dog and Donegal

Off to Donegal for the weekend - a welcome break from the quotidian. One glance at the beach (with a schnauzer for scale - yes, she's back LB) and you'll know why it's a place we love to go. Out walking with Iz on Saturday morning, I checked out the bog on the hill behind the house and found this beautiful tiny shrub with its subtly coloured flowers -- very boggy colours, repeated again in the sphagnum (S. rubellum). Bogs are full of rubies and garnets and ambers in the winter, showing up against the silvers and golds of the lichens and winter-dead grasses and sedges. Of course come mid-late summer, the heathers (yes, including Erica cinerea) will reassert themselves, turning the beiges of winter to one of 'heavens' embroidered cloths' of purple and gold. 

Spring comes to the bog

Sphagnum rubellum and lichen

Over the couple of days we also spent time on the local beaches and enjoyed the bright spring sunshine and the incoming tide. On rocks at the end of one of the beaches, I found hunkered limpets along with rimes of salt and tiny barnacles. (And yes, I did have a moment as I wrote that when I tried to imagine how a gastropod would actually hunker down.) The water here was quiet, but from just beyond the rocks, the thunder of the atlantic surf rumbled and roared... The limpets in the photograph are fairly high and pointed (like tiny Errigals) as they're in a relatively protected part of the shore, but those limpets that find themselves on wild shores with harsh storms and intense wave action keep a much lower profile. 

Limpets hunker down

Winters in Donegal are harsh affairs - even mild winters such as this one will have their fair share of winter storms and cruel Atlantic winds. We were amazed to see the changes on Dooey, where winter storms (or maybe just one) had scoured the beach, cut into the base of the dunes in a way we hadn't see before and deposited a lot of nylon ropes, bits of nets, old fish crates and the inevitable random plastic detritus. 

Iz and a rope that's just too-o-o much

On the sheltered machair behind the dunes, we saw hardy cattle--some of them with tiny calves keeping close--resolutely pulling on 'scant croppings harsh with salt of the sea'.  Along these Atlantic shores, the salt is as much a problem as the cold or wet and this winter has  taken its toll a little on a willow we planted here last spring. It's a Salix gracilistyla var. Melanostachys, a gorgeous thing with black and red catkins. But it's holding firm. Both it and an alder we planted the year before are settling in nicely into really damp land at the base of a hill covered with hazel scrub: the same hill Iz and I walk up to reach the bog beyond. 

Of course in gardening terms, this is the weekend in Ireland when early spuds should be going into the ground and gardeners in general are busy busy in tunnel and greenhouse and taking over sunny window sills. My tomato seedlings all have their first true leaves now, and I transplanted some of them from the seed trays into pots. Hope they survive without my TLC - a helpful son is keeping an eye (thanks DM). 

So yes, I should have been gardening, but yes too, it's good to go west, it's good to stretch the eyes to farther horizons, it's good to see fragments of rainbows as the March weather throws some showers at us, it's good to see the Milky Way at night, it's good to see the sun come up behind the hills of Donegal. 

Thanks for a lovely weekend, CQ, SOT and of course BvG. 

March always surprises

Happy Iz