Category: Gardening

An English Country Garden – in France

Peek through the chain link fence.  There – an expanse of grass.  Perhaps two or three trees, organised in a line or some geometric shape.  Over in the corner, a vegetable patch.  If you’re lucky, there may be a bed of flowers near the house or down at the end there.  That’s the standard garden in our corner of France, even though you’ll find plenty of gorgeous gardens too, in hidden corners.

A garden down the road
A garden down the road

So different from its typical English cousin.  Herbaceous borders in the gardens of stately homes and the average garden of the average semi all owe something to the informal planting and glorious mixed colours of the traditional cottage garden.

Gill and Ken, English friends of ours, have created a wonderful outdoor area around their French home, full of year-round interest with an always-changing canvas of flowers and shrubs . Last Saturday they invited the members of the French gardening group they belong to, Graines des Jardiniers, to look around.  Gill (whose garden this really is – Ken is her labourer and gopher) was to have her Chelsea Flower Show moment.

It was one of those grim days we’ve become accustomed to this year: moments of driving rain and whirling gusty winds alternated with sunny intervals.  Chilly too, and their guests turned up in winter coats with fur-trimmed hoods.  But enthusiasm for the pleasure of sauntering round the garden soon took over.  Winding gravelled paths encouraged exploration.  Flowers everywhere filled irregular-sized beds and scrambled up hilly banks and round convenient tree trunks.  There were seats under pergolas and arbours, on which you could rest whilst admiring the garden itself and the hilly countryside beyond: a pond to discover too.

And for her French guests, Gill had laid on a proper English afternoon tea.  Scones with butter and jam (no clotted cream though), rock cakes, ginger cakes, drenched lemon cake and date loaf, all washed down with a ‘nice cup of tea’.

The group, whose members must have gardens very different from the French stereotype,  had come with plants to swap and ideas to share.  They were keen on Gill’s garden.  We were keen on them.  We think , like Gill and Ken, that this is a group we’d like to join.

Plant swap time.
An uninvited guest

‘I am the lizard king. I can do anything.’ *

Summer’s arrived: well, this week anyway.  So from before breakfast until long after the evening meal we’re spending as much time as we can out in the garden.  And we have plenty of company.  Lizards.  Common wall lizards, podarcis muralis.  They are indeed spectacularly common here.  We have no idea exactly where they live, but there are plenty who call our garden ‘home’.  We’re beginning to get to know a few.

Easily the most identifiable is Ms. Forktail, she of the two tails.  She’s the only one we’ve been able to sex conclusively as well, because we caught her ‘in flagrante’ with Mr. Big behind the gas bottles recently.  And then the next day she was making eyes at a younger, lither specimen, and the day after that it was someone else.  She’s lowering the moral tone of our back yard.

Longstump

Then there’s Longstump, who’s lost a tiny portion of tail, and Mr. Stumpy, who hasn’t got one at all, though it seems not to bother him.  Redthroat has a patch of crimson under her chin.  There are several youngsters who zip around with enthusiasm and incredible speed.

In fact they all divide their time between sitting motionless for many minutes on end, and suddenly accelerating, at top speed and usually for no apparent reason, from one end of the garden to the other, or vertically up the wall that supports our young wisteria. On hot days like this  (36 degrees and counting) they’ll seem to be waving at us.  Really they’re just cooling a foot, sizzled on the hot wood or concrete.  Sometimes you’ll see them chomping their way through some insect they’ve hunted, but often they’ll step carelessly and without interest over an ant or other miniature creepy-crawly in their path.

Happy hour for Longstump

Mainly they ignore one another, but sometimes there are tussles.  These may end with an uneasy standoff, or with the two concerned knotted briefly together in what could scarcely be described as an act of love.

We could spend hours watching them, and sometimes we do.  But there is still a bathroom to build, a workroom to fit out, and a pergola to design.  The kings and queens of the yard have no such worries.  They can do anything: they choose not to.

‘Our’ lizards on their personal sun-loungers

*Jim Morrison, 2008

Daffodil time

On the road from Ripon to Harrogate

I had a very pressing reason for wanting to come back to England for a few weeks.  I couldn’t wait for April, much less May.  The March heat wave made me worry that already I might be too late: I needed to see daffodils.

Of course the French have daffodils in their gardens too. Well, some people do.  You can even find them, delicate and lemon-hued up in the woods.  But nothing to compare with our English exuberance.

Here, regiments of daffodils march down the edges of inner-city dual carriageways.  Swathes of them along the verges announce the entrance to almost every town.  Shopping centres have great tubs full.  Gardens, whether tiny gravelled spaces in front of town terraces, cottage style plots, or more extensive lawned affairs, all boast generous clumps of brilliant yellow trumpets swaying in the breeze.

From the top of the bus passing through Ripley

Nothing else makes me so aware that winter’s on the way out.  Not the blossom slowly unfurling on the trees, nor the spears of green thrusting through the soil and moss on every country walk, and in every garden.  Of course I love these too.  But for me, nothing but those bright assertive confident flowers can state quite so definitely – even defiantly – ‘Spring is here!’

The Old College, Ripon

The stars from HelpX

Despondent about your DIY? Ground down by your garden?  Then HelpX can help!

Its website says it’s ‘volunteer work in exchange for free accommodation and food on farms, backpacker hostels, lodges, horse stables and even sailing boats’.  Or even places like ours, apparently.

For the past 10 days, we’ve been sharing our home with HelpX-ers Vicki – Australian – and her English husband Marc.  It was a success from the very moment they landed outside our house with their laden motorbikes, fresh from working in Carcassonne and northern Italy.

Since they arrived they’ve rolled up their sleeves and cheerfully tiled and grouted most of our very awkward roof terrace, painted a stairwell, wrestled with brambles and ivy on the garden, solved computer problems…. and commandeered the kitchen.

Vicki and Marc travel the world, and many of their memories seem to be food related.  So they’ve cooked southern Asian dishes like sang choy bow & gado gado and Vicki’s wonderfully decadent and not-at-all Asian chocolate mousse: recipes to follow in a later blog.  The other evening – their final night – was the occasion for an ‘Asian tapas-Smörgåsbord’ of a dozen dishes masterminded by Marc.

Our memories of the week are of a happy, optimistic, funny and considerate couple who’ve worked hard and enthusiastically on our behalf, and whose company has been nothing but a pleasure.  We miss them.

Cleaning the terrace on day 1
Patent pulley system
Is that tiling straight?
After lunch – ivy destruction
Later: meal prep underway
Next day: yet more tiling
A break at Esperaza market
Now it’s grouting time…..
…and the terrace is well on its way
Ivy & bramble management again
An hour or two off
Gado gado: part of the Asian tapas-Smörgåsbord
Ready to go……
….gone.

Back yard makeover: part 2

Even if you don’t normally click on links, please look at this one:  It shows our house and yard both back in the Bad Old Days, and up until about a year ago.  We think things have moved on again.  Take a look.Over on the left is pretty much where we got up to last year.


Then we added another seating area, and wood to cover the ghastly concrete that we couldn’t dig up near the house.  Have you spotted that gravel from Raissac yet?

There it all is, seen from our bedroom window.  There’s just one major job to do.  And that’s to top off the two raised beds with large lengths of wood, so we can use them to sit on as we admire our peaceful outside space.  Our day out to collect that wood is yet another story.



The tale of the cherries and the peach

While we were in England in May, Léonce wrote and said the local cherry harvest had been and gone.  The fruit, thanks to the early heat wave, was wizened, dry, and had peaked far too early.  We wrung our hands in displeasure at having missed the offerings from the two mighty cherry trees in our garden, and tried to forget about it.

On Tuesday, when we got back to Laroque, I went to the garden.  And there were our trees, branches grazing the ground with the weight of their fruit.  I started to pick.  Five minutes later, it was raining.  Stair rods.  I scuttled home with some treasured cherries.

Wednesday morning dawned clear after a rainy night, and straight after breakfast we were up at the garden with buckets, eager to pick all that lovely fruit.  Almost every single cherry had turned mouldy overnight.  We managed to pick a few, half a bucketful.  But back at home, they didn’t stand up to close inspection and we had to discard almost all of them.  So that was that.

Now for the good news.  In early spring, we bought a peach tree.  We planted it. It prospered.  It flowered.  To give it the best start in life, so the tree would give its energy to putting down roots rather than nourishing its fruits, we removed every single blossom.  Or so we thought.

When we went out to see our little tree on our return, this is what we found.

We ought to pick it and throw it away I suppose, but we haven’t the heart.  Come and visit us in August, and you might get a bite of our very first home-grown peach

The Garden of Earthy Delights

At this time of year, with spring nudging the crocuses, violets and celandine into flower, and encouraging buds on trees to fatten and swell  before bursting into flower, it’s time to be busy outside.

My single patch of white violets among all the purple

Our garden’s a minute or two’s walk from the house, and out of sight can mean out of mind.  So once there (‘I’ll only be 10 minutes’….), I’ll find all kind of things to do.  The grass needs strimming already.  The vegetable patch is a disgrace.  The fruit trees need attention: they suffered horribly in last May’s heavy snow, and they should really have had careful pruning much earlier this month. The compost heap needs a bit of TLC.  Time passes while I prune our ‘vineyard’ – 6 vines. (‘Oh, sorry, have I really been two hours?’)

The pear tree: lots of character, not many pears

So I’ve taken a big decision.  No vegetable patch this year.  That way, the trees may get the extra attention they need:  the ivy and brambles may not get the upper hand quite so readily, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

I’m not going to do it on my own though.  From Easter, we’re planning new recruits to the garden: a gang of hens, whose job it will be to peck away at all the grubs, and keep the grass trimmed, whilst offering the occasional egg for breakfast.

The hens next door running free

Quite a few friends in England have re-homed ex-battery hens, and I’d love to do this too.  I’ve written emails, joined internet discussions, asked around, but it doesn’t look as if I’m going to be able to find any here in France.  But the search goes on as we plan the next project: build a hen house.

Although it’s often a lot of hard work, this garden’s a really special place for me  (and I do mean me.  Malcolm’s excused gardening duties so long as I’m excused DIY duties).  From it, I can see Montségur, the thickly wooded long chain of hills called the Plantaurel, and the snowy peaks of the Pyrénées behind .  So near to town, and away from the house, it’s where I come to get away from it all, and have a healthy workout as I dig, hack, uproot and generally try to keep Nature at bay.By the way:  greenfinch update.  Enough already!  They’ve shown themselves to be belligerent, selfish dogs-in-the-manger, who dive-bomb, use their wings to beat off the opposition, peck, bamboozle – anything to keep any other bird away, even ones who are eating their least favourite thing on the feeding station.

Greenfinch fighting

They’re also extremely messy.  I’ve told them.  I’m not replenishing the feeder till they’ve eaten every scrap of the food mountain they’ve dumped on the ground beneath.

Oh, and as our lunch guests pointed out,  it was a goldfinch, not greenfinch onslaught we had two years ago.  We’ve seen none since.  They’re all 4 miles up the road at my friend’s house in le Peyrat.

The Answer Lies in the Soil. Or: My Sad Life

So my life has come to this.  A new plant-bed full of fresh earth, topped off with quantities of unctuous well-rotted manure, and I’m ecstatic.

Herb bed in waiting

That new bed for herbs that we’ve built in the courtyard has been a bit of a problem.  I couldn’t lay my hands on any top soil to fill it.  Then at last, I was in the right place at the right time.  Mireille’s neighbour offered her some. She didn’t want it, but I did, and yesterday, the laden car made two trips down from their out-of-the-way hamlet, la Couronne, stuffed with a dozen or more tubs of rich crumbly red earth.

Manure to gladden the heart

Did I put those tubs away once I’d emptied the soil out?  No. Our manure-providing donkeys are on strike at the moment (they ARE French after all), or rather people have been taking their produce faster than they can deliver.  But Jean-Claude, our new friend from the Andorra trip, has come to the rescue, and just after 8.30 this morning, there I was, shovelling the stuff into those over-worked tubs to pop in the car.

The garden’s sorted, manured, I’ve planted spring bulbs, re-organised the strawberry plants, generally slave-driven myself all morning long.  And do you know?  I’m happy as anything.  Could it have anything to do with the sun, I wonder?  Here we are, October 6th, and I’m in strappy top and shorts while the thermometer reads 23 degrees.

A late passion flower, its petals open for one day only, keeps me company

P.S.  If you don’t know why ‘the answer lies in the soil’, you’re not a British child of the 50’s, and you may need to explore the link.