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Strichen is a planned estate village in the Buchan district of north-east Aberdeenshire, laid out in the 1760s on a regular grid by Lord Strichen beside the South Ugie Water. The village sits in the wide, relatively flat Buchan plateau country — some of the most intensively farmed arable land in Scotland — where oilseed rape covers vast acreages in spring and white clover on the improved grasslands and field margins runs through summer. Mormond Hill, the distinctive quartzite ridge rising immediately to the west, carries heather and gorse from late July into September and is visible from much of central Buchan. The nearby Strichen stone circle and the Ugie valley woodland give some structural forage diversity in an otherwise open agricultural landscape. The proximity to Fraserburgh and the coastal machair forage of the Rattray Head peninsula is accessible to mobile apiaries in the area.

Oilseed rape on the vast arable belt around Inverurie, Turriff and Ellon is the defining early flow — Scotland's single biggest rape region. Hawthorn and sycamore carry the post-rape period; lime lights Aberdeen's granite streets in June. The heather of Royal Deeside, the Ladder Hills and the Cabrach gives one of the finest and most commercially worked heather honey flows in Britain. Bilberry and hill forage add; a short but real ivy flow on the granite villages finishes the year.