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Fort Matilda is a residential district on the Clyde shore between Greenock and Gourock, taking its name from an eighteenth-century coastal battery built to defend the river approaches during the period of French wars. The area developed as a prosperous Victorian and Edwardian suburb, with large stone villas and terraced houses occupying the hillside terraces above the railway line, and mature garden trees — sycamore, beech, lime and rowan — in some of the most substantial private plots in Inverclyde. Fort Matilda railway station on the Gourock line is the local halt. The Clyde estuary views from the hillside gardens extend across to Helensburgh and the Argyll shore; the wooded policies of the larger villa properties carry dense stands of mature sycamore that are among the most productive suburban forage sites on the south Clyde coast.

Sycamore is the dominant May flow tree throughout Inverclyde, lining the Victorian and Edwardian streets of Greenock and Port Glasgow and covering the steeper hillsides above the town in semi-natural woodland. White clover on the amenity grasslands, parks and road verges of the coastal towns is the main mid-summer crop from June through August. Hawthorn on the hedgerows of the agricultural land between Kilmacolm and Inverkip provides a strong May blossom flow. The Renfrewshire Heights above Greenock and Inverkip carry extensive heather moorland from mid-July through September — one of the most accessible upland heather grounds from the Glasgow conurbation, and a traditional destination for beekeepers moving colonies in late July. Himalayan balsam is establishing on the Kip Water and Gryfe corridors. Bramble on old quarry and railway embankment sites around Greenock provides a useful late-summer supplement. Gorse and broom on the hillside rough grazing above the coastal towns provides a sustained spring flow from April. Ivy on the older stone buildings and Victorian tenements closes the calendar in October.