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Saltcoats is a Victorian seaside town at the centre of the North Ayrshire coast, formerly a salt-making settlement and now a popular day-trip resort with a long sandy beach and the North Ayrshire Museum housed in a converted eighteenth-century church. The promenade and beachfront gardens carry some planting, but the main bee forage comes from the Garnock valley farmland and the gardens of the town's Victorian and Edwardian terrace belt. The Saltcoats town centre is compact, and the gardens of the larger properties on the hill streets behind the high street carry productive sycamore, hawthorn and fruit trees. The coastal grassland on the town's southern edge adds white clover and bird's-foot trefoil through summer.

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.