Bog Myrtle & Peat

There is a fine line between being a wild shoot keeper and a gardener. If I had known that my decision to build the Chayne into a natural haven for wild birds and mammals would result in my house being filled with seed trays and plant hormones, I would maybe have thought twice. My day to day business on the farm involves so much management of plant and tree life that a watering can and a chainsaw have become unexpectedly vital tools in my bid to reinstall native bird species.

As I type, I have nineteen ash saplings, eight hazel, twelve willow, five sycamore and two baby holly bushes sitting on the windowsill behind me. Outside, I have an eight litre seed tray filled with heather seeds from “Speyside Heather”, a company that specialises in shipping authentic Scottish plants and seeds to homesick ex-pats in Canada and New Zealand. The seeds themselves were tiny beige specks, and they needed to be frozen before sowing so that they would germinate. The accompanying paperwork tells me that they will take between three and six months to emerge, so what I am going to do until then is anyone’s guess. I bought six packets of the stuff, and five of them will go in the heather laboratory along with my six ornamental varieties of ling which are currently sitting on the doorstep beside an aborted attempt to cultivate wild bilberry.

I was told that cuttings are a good way to produce cheap trees and I have been making forays in that direction over the past twenty four hours. How a twig can become a separate tree is a mystery, and I can’t help wondering if I was to cut my thumb off, dip it in rooting powder and plant it out in a pot whether a genetically identical copy of myself would grow. Maybe that is an experiment for another day.

As it stands, I have six willow cuttings which are already starting to produce buds, six creeping juniper fronds, five cypress twigs and an unidentified breed of conifer which was poking into my garden from next door and was duly lopped off and planted. Gardening is not something that I have ever had any interest in at all, but with black grouse as the goal, I am prepared to experiment with anything.