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Aboyne is a handsome Royal Deeside village and burgh that clusters around its green and loch, halfway between Banchory and Ballater on the road that follows the Dee toward the Cairngorms. The annual Aboyne Highland Games, held on the village green in late August, draw visitors from across the north-east; the loch itself is a National Nature Reserve for its wintering wildfowl and provides bankside elder and willowherb forage through summer. Royal Deeside's forested valley sides — Scots pine, birch and mixed broadleaf on the drumlins above the river — carry the colony-building sycamore and hawthorn flows of May before opening into the ling heather of the Cairngorms foothills above 300 metres. The Deeside farmland immediately east of the village carries oilseed rape and white clover into July; the Hill of Fare woodland to the north adds to the forage palette accessible to apiaries at Aboyne.

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.