My book, The Natural Health Service, is out now. It explores how the great outdoors can help treat mental illnesses and how society needs to change to give all of us access to nature. You can buy it here: https://t.co/KeAczs1ltS

Cucumber spider?

Whoop whoop, did my first parkrun since getting long covid in autumn 2023. Walked most of the course and then ran the last 500m. Has been a boring and irritating experience for the past year and a half but am pleased to be recovering - as is Bertie!

Meant to say - you can vote for the garden to win the people’s choice award here https://t.co/uFoVAWpe6d

And I had a Common Twayblade, Neottia ovata, on the garden too. As it originally seeded itself on a path on my allotment it definitely counts for #wildflowerhour

A v wonderful weekend at Scone Palace. Delighted that my show garden won a silver medal! It’s inspired by the bings of West Lothian and the amazing wild flora found growing there. Also lots of love for the drystone wall seating which was actually made from old concrete paving

New one for me for #wildflowerhour, which was pleasing: Chickweed Wintergreen, Lysimachia europaea, in woodland near Blairgowrie, Perthshire

My last activity on Strava - on balance I probably shouldn’t have gone on that run “to clear the lungs” two weeks after covid. The past year and a half might have been a bit more fun if I’d not been an idiot about my recovery back then. We live and learn (I hope)

First bike ride since the long covid descended back in Nov 2023. Only a 20 min pootle with my wee boy but felt so good. Has been the thing he’s been looking forward to the most about mummy getting better

Top find for me today in the car park of the Witney Premier Inn: my first cowslips of the year. Nowhere near out back home in Scotland! #wildflowerhour

I find the richness of these adventures lingers with me for years. I still feel happy about that 2018 trip, and have layered on more happiness and good memories now.

I had a lovely slow walk back to where I’m staying. I only passed runners, and felt the odd pang for my lungs and heart working properly like they did before I got Covid in October 2023. But equally I’m now well enough to be able to gently push my walking further. I saw so much.

And as exciting, wild hoop petticoat daffodils, Narcissus bulbocodium

Later still I found the very cool Phelipanche nana, a holoparasitic plant that parasitises the invasive Oxalis pers-caprae

Sawfly was the one Ophrys I hadn’t managed to see when I was last here botanising in 2018

Later as I plodded along, I was photographing a mimosa, looked down, and just by my feet was THIS. A beautiful, perfect, Sawfly orchid, Ophrys tenthredinifera

A little further along I found this - oh my! I’ve wanted to see a red cage fungus, Clathrus ruber, for years. I’d almost overlooked it as a squashed orange

Right next to the first Giant Orchid that I found were Common Twayblades, Neottia ovata, just coming to flower

Today I had a wonderful slow plod through Parque Florestal de Monsanto in Lisbon. I’d come out hoping to see a Giant Orchid, Himantoglossum robertianum, as I’d been too late in the season when I last came here in 2018. There were hundreds of them dotted throughout the park

Also a kestrel dismembering a mouse.

Absolutely brutal