Safely back, after a good week. It felt precarious, but all went well. How many more?

This for Hat, the Babington leeks in the vegetable cage, along with some parsley I bought on the way up:

It’s been a dry spring. I think Strathardle has missed out on rain elsewhere – James calls it the “Strathardle mini-climate”. The clematis montana on the front of the house, eight or nine years old, one of our most successful plantings, appears to be dead. The metasequoia glyptostroboides has taken a bad hit, and lost maybe half of its height. Both were fine, a month ago.

The metasequoia is one of those stories – I must have told it here before – of something identified in a fossil (by a Japanese scientist during the war, I think). Then after the war when knowledge began to circulate again, the Chinese said, Oh, yes, we’ve got that. It was imported to Europe where it grows vigorously. There’s one at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. It’s called the Dawn Redwood, more colloquially. We planted ours for James and Cathy when they married.

And it has struggled. It is a water-loving tree (you’d think it would be fine, in Strathardle) and we made the mistake of planting it on a slope. The soil is essentially sandy. I have nursed it through a Sicilian summer – they do happen – hauling water up from the burn . But I thought the danger was past, and the roots now deep enough to withstand a spring drought.

I got the tatties planted. I won’t be doing much with vegetables this year, what with old age and deer, but they will give an impression of order to the patch, and be delicious to eat. One can see how the Irish got hooked on them.

I saw a pair of deer on the lawn one morning, nibbling the bluebells. Mercifully, they don’t seem to like daffodils. They lept nimbly over the dyke into the neighbour’s garden.

And that reminds me of a rant. In the film “The Queen” – how on earth did I see it? – the Duke of Edinburgh is represented as telling his wife that he had seen a stag – later of iconic significance – and that it ran off “towards the neighbours”, or something like that.

That’s not how country people talk, and I don’t believe the royal family are any different. Places are referred to by words which can be found on a map – “It ran towards Pitmarmick”. Or in a private family language – “It went off down the commonty”, “It ran across the stubble field”. Or by the names of the neighbours: “It went into Douglas’s bit”, “It was in the Nicholsons’ field”.

In this case, the deer were in Douglas’s bit, and that’s how I reported them to my husband.

The youth who came to give the grass its first cut – it is actually growing – found the foot and lower leg of a lamb on the west lawn. I told him about the leg-of-deer we found in April. A fox, I thought. Something Larger, in his opinion.