Images from the beautiful Dawyck Botanic Gardens taken yesterday. Scrape Glen looked quite mystical in the hazy sunshine.

The Gardens have a long history but are now part of the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. they are open from February - November each year.

Mysteries of the Borders.

Why are these sheep orange? Contributions so far: i) that it just happens to be the colour of the sheep dip used; ii) that it's to help them stand out in the snow. If you know the answer or have a different theory please let me know.

What are these stone circles for. I would guess they are intended to provide shelter for the sheep in the winter?

The Tala Reservoir again, pictures taken this morning - amazingly clear on this freezing cold day.

The River Tweed in early April again at Bemersyde.

The Copper Beech on Bemersyde (late June). It's changing colours mark the seasons. Apparently there are a few days in autumn when it is a glorious flame of colour. Unfortunately I missed it this year.

Bemersyde, a few miles upstream from The Junction Pool is less well-known known but reputedly the prettiest fishing beat on The Tweed.

Photograph - Bemersyde in late June.

When I first moved to the Borders it took me some time to really appreciate just how few people there really are here - I mean to really understand the scale of the difference. The borders covers about eighteen hundred square miles and has a population of approx. 106,000 people (when I first read that number I thought it must be a mistake!) In comparison my home city of Leeds and the surrounding district covers 600 square km and accommodates almost 1 million people. Talk about space to breathe....

80% of the land in the Borders is still used for agriculture, with tourism and fishing also been extremely important. At the end of November the fishing season closes, and until it starts again in February, there is an unearthly quiet in normally bustling towns like Kelso. Even the Christmas and New Year visitors don’t make much of an impact. Kelso is absolutely a fishing town despite being quite beautiful in it’s own right. Once last year I visited both chemists in the town to ask for children’s vitamins - a pretty standard request you might think - and in both shops was met by a slightly quizzical look and ‘we don’t really do much for children’. This belies the fact that there are obviously quite a few children living in Kelso, and schools to prove it! The shops cater almost entirely for the fishermen, tourists, and retirees who flock here each year .

Having said that, there is a huge amount of development going on in the Borders - presumably mainly for people commuting to Edinburgh, which is just up the road. This was something that worried me a lot when I first moved here - was this beautiful countryside about to be gobbled up by houses? When I was a child I lived in a small town outside Leeds but within fifteen years the place was consumed by the city - when I go back now it’s unrecognisable. But the sheer scale of the Borders and its complete emptiness - once you get a mile or so away from the main routes - mean that this is unlikely to happen in my life time. I hope it never does.

Photograph: The Junction Pool at Kelso - one of the most famous fishing beats in the world.

The first heavy frost arrived last night. It is -6 in the garden although for once, I'm told, even colder down south. Thanks to Linda Pollitt for the photo, taken this morning (Scottish Garden). Linda tells me that the heavily laden trees are a sign of a harsh winter to come.

When I'm here I feel that I could almost reach out and touch the past.

It has a magical air of tranquility.

Dryburgh Abbey is one of my favourite places, and looks just as beautiful on a cold winter morning as at the height of summer.

Operation Mouse

It’s that time of year when the all furry creatures seek somewhere warm to overwinter, in the case of our local mice it seems that means moving into our garage, lock, stock and suitcase.

Being newbies last year, we naively decided that we could happily live alongside the mice – we didn’t mind them in the garage at all. In fact, it felt as if we were doing our bit for the local wildlife. The mice took complete advantage of the situation, who can blame them, and by the time we realised our mistake they were way ahead us. They’d had weeks of unhindered breeding time and had long since abandoned the garage for cosier, more nutritious areas of the house.

An intensive mousetrap trial followed as we tried every humane mousetrap we could find, eventually settling on a large American design that could catch several at once. With two of these in strategic positions we caught several mice a day for a good few weeks. One mouse, of course, being clever than the rest worked out how to spring the doors and escape. He became quite famous with his little nose scar, no doubt scraped against the top of the trap as he made his exit. We caught this escapee several times – and he escaped just as easily – before finally being rehomed.

Not being up to killing the mice we ended up taking long walks with them, abandoning them in unused farm buildings some way from the village. Real country people will no doubt laugh at this – sentimental about mice, bah, and quite right too – but I could never quite shake it off. Worse, I often worried as we walked back to the house about whether they would be too cold in their new home!

Rats, who inhabited the garden for a short while in the summer, do not have the same ‘ahh’ factor, although I must admit to admiring their ingenuity and guile. Despite their reputation they can be picky eaters too. We realised accidentally that our rats just loved pasta with pesto sauce - in fact, they found it irresistable. One afternoon the trap was baited and we set a trail of their favourite pasta with pesto cuisine. The rats loved the pasta – they ran out of their little home picked up a piece of pasta and ran right back in again. This happened several times, but they stopped just short of the trap. We realised we’d been outwitted again - we had stocked up their larder and now they had no need to move anywhere for a while. They were on borrowed time, however – think ‘rat’ and I immediately think ‘Weil’s disease’ and other unpleasant germs. Eventually, experts had to be called in to remove them.

Back to the mice – we’ve learned our lesson this year and have already set the first traps. I don’t imagine for one minute that we’ll get them all, but if we can prevent last year’s population explosion I’ll be happy.

On the way up to see the waterfall, we bumped into this pair. We smelled them quite a long time before we could see them...! But then surviving winters up here takes a tough animal and a seriously thick, oily coat.

Two miles east of the Megget Water is St Mary's Loch, reputedly one of the most beautiful lochs in Scotland (picture soon!), and further down the valley this pristine waterfall, known as the Grey Mare's Tail.

The Megget Water.