It’s cool and wet and the beech leaves have just unfurled.
Under the trees the woodland flowers are making the best of the sunlight before the green canopy closes over for the summer.
There are ransoms ( wild garlic) and marsh marigolds along the stream , the garlic mustard would tempt orange tip butterflies out, if only the rain would stop! There are vetchlings and cinq foils and easily overlooked there is Herb Paris ( Paris quadrifolia ) flowering in the shade.
I really like this plant for its unassuming nature and its curious symmetry.
It is difficult to photograph, but botanical illustrations do it much more justice. Only an artist can show all the aspects of this odd plant at once. It is also called true lovers’ knot and the equality of the leaves and petals made it a symbol of harmonious marriage, which is another reason to appreciate it.
The name refers not to the French capital nor to the Paris of classical mythology, but comes from the Latin “pars” meaning equal and refers to the equal number of simple leaves and yellow stamens.
It grows in calcareous woods, but takes a long time to establish. It is therefore a very good sign of undisturbed ancient woodlands and is used by botanists as an indicator species.
The inconspicuous flowers are obviously not attractive to bees and it appears to be wind or fly pollinated. It slowly spreads through rhizomes, which explains its rarity and love of undisturbed soil.
Sometimes the less showy is the most persistent and faithful !
It must be spring. Every time I open the compost bin when the sun is out I find smooth, shiny slow worms.
These wonderful legless lizards love the heat generated by my decomposing potato and apple peelings and when the time is right they coil around each other and do what you do in the spring!
They take their time and can be together for hours. Unfortunately, me dropping vegetable pairings on their head can disturb the romance and if they feel really threatened they will shed a wriggling tail to put the predator off their train as they disappeared head down into the warm compost.
The weather has taken a sharp turn to cold in the last days and there has been snow on the tree line visible from our window that marks the French , Swiss border. I am sure they are fine deep in the compost bin, staying warm and maybe even making very slow, slow worm woopie!
Some moths all seem to emerge on the same night and last night was the turn of the beautiful Swallow Prominent . In French they are called Porcelains which mimics their colouring, but I like Swallow Prominent, as their arrival always seems to coincide with the arrival of the first swallow!
There has been an awful fashion of seeing a garden as just another room and this has encouraged us to pave it over or to bury it under decking.
The black bit is liberated patio.
This is simply terrible.
Paved over land cannot absorb water and it cannot sustain plants and all the other creatures we share our world with.
“You’re a happier person when you live in a green surrounding, so every slab you flip is 900 square centimetres of potential happiness. You’re also healthier and, if that’s not enough, there are the big problems we are facing with climate change.”
This quotation comes from a wonderful Dutch movement to dig up your paving slabs and to let the garden and life come back.
We cannot change everything that is wrong with the world but we can start in our own back yard by flipping over the pavement stones and letting the garden back in.
Let your garden go free!
I have started with my own back garden. I have a big, pointless patio that is actually used only once a year maximum. I have to spray clean it twice a year and sweep it every other day in the summer.
I have started lifting paving stones and covering the sand in compost from my own bins . Plants are already stretching out into the new space and seedlings are growing despite the rain.
Do read the article from Holland and the video is very funny!
It has been a cold wet Easter here and the storks have wind ruffled feathers.
I know how they feel as they hunker down on their nests waiting for the warmer weather . These nests are right in front of the local church and the the trees are specially trimmed each autumn to ensure that the birds have a safe easily accessible platform for their nest in the spring, before the leaves appear.
The storks all sat close on their nests as the congregation came out to admire them on a windy Easter Sunday morning.
A city famous for drugs is leading the way in using greenery to cool our heating world.
I lived in São Paulo, Brazil for two years and the heat in the city was like being hit in the face with baseball bat. I am delighted to read that this Brazilian city is following Medellin in Colombia, in cooling things down.
If, like me, you worry when you land being covered in solar panels, then this is very good news! The ground around them is richer in wildlife than farms. The future may be greener than we think!
February was mild and spring seemed to have started early.
Willow tree buds were soft furred downy for weeks and weeks and seemed likely to spring into life at any moment. The weather turned a little colder, but on a sunny day, they decided to burst with yellow pollen like a frozen firework.
The golden pom-poms were soon loud with bees ; who have been waiting for just this bounty to leave the hive and start the year’s labour of turning flowers into honey.
The moths appear in ones and twos on mild nights.
An early grey moth lives up to its name.A satellite shows the moons orbiting the yellow suns on its’s wings.Black spotted chestnut blending in with the garden table top.
Nothing too showy yet – the season is gently sliding into spring!
This first moth of the season has the most beautiful ethereal name. It is redolent of improbable cloistered maidens pining away under willow trees.
As the very first moth of the season I had to be sure it wasn’t a belted beauty ( very rare!) or a straight brindled beauty, which is hairier and appears a few weeks later.
Despite its very feminine name, this photo is most definitely a male.
There were two moths in the trap and although they showed some variation, they were both male pale brindled beauties. The reason I can be so confident is that the female is completely wingless and is to be found on tree trunks at this time of year, waiting for the winged male to visit .
There are so many moths to remember again after the dull winter months with none to see at all, that the brain has to be kick started again.
In order to keep my mother brain ticking during the winter I have made a list of over 250 species that I have confidently identified in the garden. I have put them in the order of their seasonal appearance with their Latin names. Unfortunately I don’t have the IT brain needed to up load this list ( currently in excel) onto my blog! When I have worked it out, I’ll share it with you (don’t hold your breath!)
In the neighbouring village, a retired neighbour celebrates love with hearts in his garden. I used to think Valentine’s Day fake and contrived; but in our segmented and fractured world, I think some wooden painted heats might go a long way to warm a cold February for us all.
The countryside needs the kiss of spring too. I have spied a few snow drops and helibores in flower, but it is the winter ferns that remind us of the green to come.
They keep the faith that spring is coming and blow a kiss to the changing air!
The snow has gone and the temperatures have shot up. In the woods the hazel is ready for spring.
Hazel hedges all possible bets, if you look closely at the photo you can see catkins with yellow pollen; catkins that have already shed their pollen and catkins tightly closed, waiting for real spring before doing anything foolish.
Snow may return or sunshine may linger and bees wake up. The hazel is ready for anything!
I turn my pasty face to the sun and wonder what the next month will bring!
The snow is still on the ground and frost on every twig, but eventually there will be meadow brown butterflies on the wild marjoram on my wilded front drive, so I was fascinated by this bit of evolution.
When it started, I opened the kitchen door and the silence flowed in. After the bluster and rattle of a warm front shaking the garden, the cold came flowing quietly behind. The door opened to thick silence as the flakes ate the noise of the very world.
After a few days of jig saws and filling up bird feeders, it was time to go out for a walk.
After struggling along the snow ploughed road we made it to an absolutely pristine flat path, where no one had walked. It is difficult to find a path that a dog walker has not trodden first, but this was it!
Along the edge there was a set of prints, rather like a small dog’s, but no human boots accompanied them. This was a fox, going on his own wild way on the path, blissfully alone in the snow.
He walked a surprisingly long way, veering off occasionally to dig under a willow root and then return to the white path.
Where alder trees grow along the stream, long ice crystals had formed on the twigs and then fallen onto the snow beneath, as thin and as sharp as needles. Brief slant sunshine made the snow glitter with iridescent lights.
The fox walked on. He went over the footbridge to the meadow. The footbridge is rotten and will not hold a lumpen human weight, but the fox trotted over, insouciant in the snow.
Across the path was a covered vole run. Under the snow a little rodent had burrowed along, safe from the buzzards and kestrels above and apparently unnoticed even by the fox. Maybe the vole had made its runway after the fox had passed by. I know that voles like thick snow as they can eat in perfect safety beneath its protection, but I had never seen its etherial tunnel before.
Snow had briefly made a hidden world of fox and vole visible.
It’s that time of year for dreaming over seed catalogues and plotting over what could be grown in the New Year.
This year I determined to grow more plants from seed, as I have the time and the desire to waste less of world in plastic flower pots from garden centres.
The were some great successes . The Indian blanket flowers were huge, prolific and kept flowering until the first frost. Coleus were also wonderful, easy to germinate and sturdy and colourful. The blue grass peas were lovely in the spring and a suprising hit in tubs.
Some very expensive scented purple petunias were well worth the cost. If I had sneezed when planting them,I would have lost the lot, as they were so tiny and few, but they grew and filled the patio with perfume all summer and autumn.
Zinnias as were a first for me and the mixture of seeds bought were rather beige, so I must chose more carefully next year. Everlasting flowers grow sturdily, but slowly and they lost the race with the cold. The few that flowered were happily picked and make a cheerful winter bouquet, but most made no blooms at all despite their impressive height .
Small but beautifully formed!
In the vegetable garden : potatoes grew very well and my husband was kept busy picking off the Colorado bettles that tried to eat the leaves.
We had spectacular green beans; excellent, celery and beetroot; endless Swiss chard and perpetual spinach that lived up to its name! This year the parsley grew prolifically, but the chilis that I lovingly nurtured were disappointingly mild and not worth drying for the winter. Two cherry tomato plants grown in planters, produced prodigious amount of fruit that we managed to incorporate into everything but keeping them alive did take a lot of saved washing up water ! Courgettes were good, but pumpkins were utterly useless. My neighbour’s grew monsters and mine completely failed to thrive or fruit. I have decided it is the wood ash that we add to the soil that does for them so comprehensively.
I went to a lot of museums and art galleries in a very middle class sort of a way. There are a surprisingly large number of very rich people in this part of the world “ diversifying” their profits into art.
It was a year of libraries and lectures. I discovered the lovely art library in Basel and a brand new local library in France with Jacqui Tatti films to loan and graphic novels so mysteriously beloved of the French. We discovered lectures open to the public in English at the botanical school of the university and I sat bemusedly through all manner of presentations on the genetic mutations of fungi, butterflies and very small rock plants.
As world news is so continuingly depressing, when the garden is not absorbing me I turn to books.
I’ve read a lot of Balzac. His unstoppable flow of language is very satisfying. I’ve continued reading Donna Leon so I can shudder at Venice without having to go there. For outright humour, I’ve enjoyed “ The Ascent of Rum Doodle” by W E Bowman and “ Supermanship” by Steven Potter who always makes me laugh. My theory is that the world needs far more funny writers to keep us all sane .
I have continued to write poetry which is becoming shorter and pithier as my patience with posturing contracts, but my need to communicate something is still undiminished.
The Garden.
Of course Eden was a garden,
We were all expelled from paradise so long ago it can be hard to recall
Cathy's real country garden 
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