Flora and Fauna Identification in Sutherland

In this post I will try to identify many of the seedlings and volunteers/'weeds' that I have seen growing well around my local area in the cool maritime climate of Sutherland, around the North/West coast of Scotland. Your help is greatly desired, so please leave a comment if you have a clue! This post will be updated until I consider it reasonably complete. (Last updated 1/7/12)

As for local flora, daisies, dandelions, nettles and heather (all with edible parts) are so ubiquitous around grassy areas here that there's no point wasting a photograph on them. Seriously, this last month I've seen a whole sheep field turn white with daisies, mowed lawns shine bright yellow with dandelions, everyone on this island has probably seen how nettles like to take over any odd nook or slope where moisture gathers, and heather... well let me just say that every few years the sheep farmers set entire hillsides ablaze up here to get rid of the stuff after it has taken over; some of the current google maps satellite images for the region still show glowing patches and smoke clouds at low levels of detail.

Most plants here suffer salt-burn from the coastal winds if not well protected, especially trees:

This is a native Rowan tree, known for producing a quite tart fruit similar to cranberries only much more sour, typically used to make jellies to accompany meat, otherwise a great bird food when left on the tree. It probably prefers to be further inland though.

Sowing Perennials Indoors

Progress was slow over the last few weeks; I lost a lot of work time looking after a friend's hungry hair-generating quadruped for them while they were away (I'm getting a bit tired of the number of animals people feed with agricultural produce when this society won't even distribute it to all humans, can you tell?), but I have learned some more about what works in this region in the meantime.

Most of the fruit trees have started blooming, this damson tree was the earliest.

Permaculture Design

Recently a friend has given me a great opportunity to try out a new design science, Permaculture, by developing a self-sustainable miniature food forest on an allotment in the Scottish Highlands. Studying permaculture design and getting ready to move out of the city over the next couple of months, has of course meant that I haven't had much time to do 3D design and writing recently, however moving soon also means I will eventually have more time and opportunity to test out my own wind turbine designs and other tech.

Having watched several hours of a wide variety of instructional videos and documentaries on various aspects of permaculture that can be found in many places online such as youtube, plus starting to read the first few chapters of Bill Mollison's brilliant "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual", I had enough grasp of the basics to start hashing out my first ideas and designs, and learn more as I go along by testing. My approach could be seen as 'jumping in the deep end', and while I would like to spend more time learning before acting, possibly even take a course on the subject, a constraint of time means that if I don't start implementing at least a few changes to this land immediately, then I'd miss the important winter period when trees can be easily moved bare-rooted and planted, while a constraint of money means that I wouldn't be able to afford attendance fees at most courses anyway.
Nonetheless, I agree somewhat with Mollison's thoughts in his manual that "Starting with a nucleus and expanding outwards is the most successful, morale-building and easily-achieved way to proceed." Where he and many others have advised that you can learn much by simply sitting back and observing nature, then testing any hypothesis of its workings, I hope that I can use nature as my university, as the ones with walls don't seem very conducive to learning.