Some interesting arrivals!

Frog spawn has appeared in my pond this week. The first batch  arrived on the night of Friday 15th March. Last year (2023) it was 20th March, and 6th April in 2022.  So this is the earliest I have seen it in my pond.

 The post has also brought some interesting arrivals.  One was a book called Mountain Flowers by Alan R Walker.

I am in the process of arranging for a second edition of Wildflower Walks around Newtonmore, and I contacted Alan as I refer to his book in the preface.  He then very kindly posted me a printed copy of his book, which has been completely revised for 2024.  The file of the book is freely available from Alan's website:

https://www.alanrwalker.com/mountain-flowers/

So go and visit and pick up your free copy!

You might wonder why a book on mountain flowers is relevant for Newtonmore... well, as Newtonmore is at 250m above sea level,  many of our flowers appear in Alan's book.  There is a page for each flower with a photo, a drawing, a distribution map and other useful information - more than you get in most flower books that don't have the room to go into each species in depth. Here's an example page.

So do go and visit Alan's website and get yourself a copy.  As a science writer by trade, Alan writes well and you will enjoy reading some of the other material on his site.

There was a reason for picking the page on Scurvygrass as it relates to the second parcel I received.  Here are the contents of the parcel:

Why on earth would someone from the University of Edinburgh send me:

• 5 plastic bags containing approximately 50g orange silica gel beads each
• 1 plastic bag containing:
• 15 empty paper tea bags
• 1 spare tea bag containing 15 paper clips
• 1 spare tea bag containing 15 small index cards
• Postage of £3.49 — enough to cover shipping the package back with second class small parcel service (please reuse the packaging if possible)
• 1 archival ink pen

(Who knew you could buy empty tea bags?) It is a science project about Danish Scurvy Grass and I will explain more in my next blog post.  If you are unsure what Danish Scurvy Grass looks like, check out this previous blog post  See you next time!