Did you know that you can listen to many of your favorite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?

Like Desert Island Discs, where you can hear castaways like Cher, Gareth Southgate and Nick Cave,

and enjoy longer versions of the music they've picked. Good things come to those who don't wait.

Listen to your favorite podcasts first on BBC Sounds. Hello and thank you very

much for downloading the Scotland Outdoors podcast. Brought to you today by BBC Radio Scotland.

I'm Mark Stephen and I'm sitting in my garden in Aberdeenshire in its brilliant sunshine,

clear blue skies. Across there I can see a variety of garden plants, snow and summer,

there's a scarlet of azalea, there's periwinkle behind that,

so that's pretty eye-catching.

But what's really been getting my attention recently

is the stuff in the field margins, the road verges, up in the woods.

The wildflowers are very much coming into their own.

There's the stuff you would expect like dandelions

what we used to call pee the bed when I was a kid

big carpets of daisies the aniseed smell of sweet sicily

we've got big banks of wrongly named red campion

because it's more pink than red

if you look closely in the grass there's these tiny wee white flowers

are common mouse here and just sticking up

the occasional purple tuft of self-heel.

The plants are all over the shop.

With me as ever from his garden, a bit further north,

...