A Wildflower Explosion

With a late winter delaying spring and the sudden change to sunny, if not warm weather - the air temperature last night dropped to 3C - the wildflowers are running hard to catch up. It may be a result of the severe winter but it does seem to me that they are unusually good this year.

This is the first thrift we've found here. We're accustomed to seeing it clinging along the tide line below steep cliffs but....

....here we found it growing along the banks of the Culmaily Burn for a couple of hundred yards above where it reaches Loch Fleet. At high tides the flat, grassy areas on either side of the burn will be flooded by salty water, creating the conditions which thrift enjoys - much to the enjoyment, too, of the local bees.

On the same 'flood plain' we found this plant. We've seen it before but have not been able to identify it, which is surprising as it's pretty obvious what it is - sea campion. It grows along the shores of Loch Fleet, in amongst the drying seaweed along the high tide line.

Masses of yellow rattle are coming into flower in the grassy meadows below Dunrobin Castle. However, we also found....

....something very similar in Balblair Woods. The flowers on this are smaller, the leaves narrower, so I indentified it as greater yellow rattle, an odd name as it's smaller and more delicate. I find identifying wildflowers extremely difficult as there seem often to be a wide range of very minor variations, and this certainly applies to the yellow rattle family. For example....

....in amongst the more common, pale green variants below Dunrobin there were these slightly reddish plants.

It is very rare to be able to identify a specific wildflower from one year to the next but this is an example. It's a northern marsh orchid and it's growing all alone behind a section of shingle beach just to the south of the castle, just as it did last year - see post here.