Ground Frost

In amongst the pansies, lobelia, snapdragons, lavender and other plants that are still in flower in our garden, and with the air temperature at just over 1C, to our considerable surprise we found a bumblebee busy on the fuchsia. It was only just about functioning: it allowed the camera to come very close without reacting and, at one point, it fell off its flower and lay dazed on the ground.

The bee and the garden flowers aren't the only things defying the coldest morning so far this winter, one which has brought the first extensive ground frost. In the hedgerows we found plenty of blooms, including campion, which must have one of the longest flowering periods of our local wildflowers.

We walked up Golspie Glen on our way to Backies, where we hoped to buy some eggs from a local croft, finding the burn much calmer after the recent rains and....

....the trees still in glorious, though much browner, colours. This beech is on a corner of the Backies road which is a classic frost pocket, where cold air that has formed on ground on the sides of the glen has slipped downhill to accumulate along the road on either side of the bridge.

Some fungi seem quite impervious to the coldest conditions. This witches' butter is growing on dead gorse and seems to drip from the branch.

It was a walk in glorious conditions, which was just as well as, when we opened the cupboard where the crofter leaves his eggs, we found it bare. Presumably the chickens aren't as hardy as some of the insects, flowers and fungi.