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Largs is a Victorian seaside resort on the Firth of Clyde, sheltered by the Haylie Brae hills to the east and looking west across the water to the Isle of Great Cumbrae. The town has a wide promenade, a sandy beach, and a prosperous Victorian villa belt with generous gardens rising on the hillside behind. The Noddsdale Water and Gogo Burn valleys above the town carry productive mixed forage: hawthorn on the field margins, sycamore and ash in the valley woodland, gorse and heather beginning where the improved ground gives way to open hill. The Clyde coast grassland and the formal gardens of the promenade add white clover, sea plantain and ornamental plantings through summer. Largs is the departure point for the Cumbrae ferry, and the island's mild climate and market garden tradition give its bees a very long forage season.

Hawthorn is the spring anchor on the Garnock valley field boundaries and the coastal farmland strips from mid-May. White clover dominates the mid-summer flow on the improved pastures around Irvine, Kilwinning and the coastal plain; the Eglinton Country Park lime and sycamore woodland provide the main structured town forage from June through July. Himalayan balsam has colonised the Garnock Water, Annick Water and River Irvine corridors, producing a sustained late-summer flow from mid-July into September. Gorse and broom are prolific on the rough hillside ground above the coast towns; heather starts on the Renfrewshire hill fringe above Beith and Kilbirnie from mid-July. The coastal grassland carries bird's-foot trefoil and sea clover through the full summer months.