Country diary: A golden secret by the side of the road | Elspeth Wilson

Ormiston, East Lothian: The start of the year has been so grey and raw, this huge patch of aconites is welcomeThe flash of yellow is almost hidden from the roadside, a sort of blink-and-you-miss-it as the cars whoosh by. With his sharp eyes, my dad had spotted the colourful interruption the day before, and wants to share his discovery with me and my mum. Over the crash barrier, our feet land softly on last year's dead leaves. A gentle hillside swoops down in a cascade of winter aconites. They are a golden secret, the biggest patch we've ever seen in Scotland. Probably escapers from someone's garden, we surmise, which have thrived in this small scrap of woodland.The start of the year has been grey and raw, so the aconites are a welcome whisper that there will always be fresh growth. But, among the flowers, there's a huge amount of litter too. Crisp packets, plastic bottles, drinks cans. The ones that have been there the longest, covered in dirt and half-submerged by leaves, blend most with the landscape. We're on a corner of the road, and it's obvious that they've been tossed out of people's windows - whoever threw them unaware that their rubbish would land in what would become, for a brief moment, a field of gold. My initial calm is replaced by worry for the badgers, foxes and other creatures that surely live nearby and now have to deal with this debris, on top of the traffic that often makes unidentifiable scraps of their bodies. Continue reading...