As I predicted two weeks ago, this turned out to be the longest run of dry weather in recent years. We’ve had so many days of sun on the trot without a cloud in the sky I’m beginning to lose count.
  

  And the reason I knew that the weather would go on and on? I’ve just planted a lawn. And ever since I’ve planted it there has been blue skies from end to end of scotland, despite forecasts to the contrary. In fact, what was once a deadly swamp that would swallow wellies before breakfast and whole diggers if it got the chance, is now cracked and dried out like a dry riverbed in the Sahel.  

I’ve been waiting months (yes months) for Ronnie the digger man to finish off the landscaping around the house. To start with the land was just too wet. And then other things got in the way. But, in the end, on Friday, Donald and a digger arrived. I was rather late on site and he’d already buried all the large rocks I’d heaved out of the garden and into a pile to be given more productive life as a rockery. 

 I’d planned for the garden to look like the surrounding landscape: wet meadow, yellow flag-iris, alder, a pond and a bank behind the patio perhaps a rockery. As I waved my hands around the garden saying where mounds of earth should go Donald said “Ach. You don’t want a garden all lumpy and bumpy, you want it all flat and straight like a central-belt garden.” 
And then he lined up the edge of the drive dead straight with the house. Stopping every bucketload or so to check the line, closing one eye and looking through a small gap he made between his palms, just to be sure. I was being his assistant, moving the planks of wood he was using to keep a straight edge and using a spade to tidy up. I wasn’t very good at it because whenever the giant toothed and terrifying bucket came anywhere near me I sprinted off to take cover. 

He dug me a beautiful pond to the most exact specifications with shallows for flag irises and gentle sloping sides. And even left me some piles of topsoil (after my special pleading for a garden with topography) to create a bank around the side of the pond and behind the patio. He shifted a pile of enormous boulders taken out of the site during the excavation for the foundation, across the site to form the base of my bank and rockery and deepened my moat/drainage ditch. 

As Donald worked a steady stream of locals came by, thinking it was Ronnie McColl, to ask when he was coming by to do work for them. Seems like I hadn’t been the only person in Cuil waiting on a digger. 

Donald seemed keen on everything being proper Scottish. Over coffee he reeled off a list of musicians who weren’t proper Scottish (and comedians). I hate Billy Connelly and Capercaillie, he said, that’s all disgusting stuff, awful, too fast, not proper Scottish music. “What you want to listen to is”, and he reeled off a list of names, very few that I had heard of. 
I wrote down the unfamiliar names on a bit of newspaper sitting on the worktop planning to look them up that evening.
‘That Oban live, that’s disgusting’ said Donald. But what about Skerryvore, they’re good though aren’t they? 

‘No they’re disgusting’ 

I wondered what he’d think of my ceilidh band, made up of a motley crew of parents from the school who scrape a ceilidh together every now and again to raise money for local causes and have some fun. And who play an arrangement of bear necessities and a spoonful of sugar for the Virginnia Reel. He seemed OK with that, but wasn’t taken with the idea of doing it to Disco Music. ‘Modern Music is disgusting,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s the Carpenters’ 

I tried to impress him with the Scottishness of my lawn and meadow mixes that I was going to plant once he’d finished with the garden landscaping. “Scotia Seeds – all the seed comes from Scottish provenance flowers” I said as I showed him the list of species and where they come from. But as soon as I looked at the ingredients I saw that all the seed comes from Angus, Fife, Invernessshire, and had a quick panic “There’s nothing from the west highland there” says donald just as I noticed myself. 
My dad said the same when I see him the following weekend. And he’s a botanist. The only solution to this dilemma is obviously for my dad and donald to wander around cuil bay’s meadows in the autumn gathering seed for me to plant. 

As soon as Donald was done I started raking the area to be seeded and sowing my flowering meadow mix for the area in front of the house and my wet meadow mix (for the ditch) and kept my kind edge mix for when the pond edge was ready. 

  
And now I just need to wait for the rain. But it looks unlikely to come for a while, or at least until all the seeds are eaten by that little pied wagtail who keeps pecking about in the dirt. Probably getting her own back for me evicting her from the nest hole she used last year in my half built house.