Footprints in the Snow.

In the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” the page following his master, steps into his masters’ footsteps . I was thinking of this when admiring badger paw prints in the fresh snow on a cold morning .

The print seemed very large and I marveled that badgers seemed much bigger than I remembered them. I realised eventually that the largest prints were doubles, made as the badger stepped into his own footprint in the snow. I wondered if , like the struggling pageboy in the carol, he kept his feet warm in this way, though I doubt if he obtained the same miraculous heat from the foot print that saved the freezing page ! I doubt the badger was following the saintly King through the snow either, but I hummed the tune nonetheless to warm myself as we walked back across the winter landscape.

The carol, as we know it, was written by John Mason Neale . It is based on a poem and uses a very old melody. King Wenceslas, the first Christian king of Bohemia was murdered by his pagan brother. The King was out in the snow taking food and fire wood to a poor man on a freezing winter night followed by his faithful page who stepped in the King’s miraculous warm footprints.

Good King Wenceslas

Hither, page, and stand by me,
if thou know’st it, telling,
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?”
“Sire, he lives a good league hence,
underneath the mountain;
Right against the forest fence,
by Saint Agnes’ fountain.”

*

“Bring me flesh, and bring me wine,
bring me pine logs hither:
Thou and I shall see him dine,
when we bear them thither.”
Page and monarch, forth they went,
forth they went together;
Through the rude wind’s wild lament
and the bitter weather.

“Sire, the night is darker now,
and the wind blows stronger;
Fails my heart, I know not how;
I can go no longer.”
“Mark my footsteps, good my page.
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
freeze thy blood less coldly.”

In his master’s steps he trod,
where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod
which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
shall yourselves find blessing.

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Winter music

When the thaw comes there is wonderful strange music.

First a single drip from the snow on the bird table lands soft in the thick white and the sound is absorbed . Then the ice on the roof starts to move. It clatters down the slates like a dislodged tile. Then a great slab of snow skitters down and lands with a terrifying crash on the back step, nearly burying the cat.

The melt water from a corrugated roof falls in marvellous intervals into the gutter, a xylophone of notes . A spout of quickly thawing snow shoots down in a noisy spear of liberated sound. Now a gamelan of melting snow plays out and the leaves that hung on to the trees through the storm, hiss down to the slushy snow below.

The sun is abruptly covered by a cloud. The temperature falls just a little, the drip slows, stutters and stops. It is oddly quiet again. The music is over until the next sun up.

Tomorrow is the day after the winter solstice. The day will be imperceptibly longer than today.

There will be more time to listen to the wonderful, weird music of thaw!

How to stay cool and save water.

It has been brutally hot and it is going to get worse, so while we wait and pray for our leaders to wake up to the reality of climate change, what can we do personally to stay cool?

1. Wear light clothes. Loose cotton dresses are much cooler than shorts as the air can move around your waist. Men look great in kaftans, which are what men wear in the hottest countries, for good reason!

3. Get up EARLY when it is cool and open every window to get the cool morning air in. Use a room fan to blow cool air into the room from the window. Warm air rises, so open any window that you can up high and suck cool air in from the basement or lower rooms. As soon as the temperature outside is warmer than inside, close and shutter to keep the cooled air in.

2. Close your windows and keep your shutters or curtains closed, when the sun is out. Open the windows only when the temperature outside is cooler than inside. Buy a little indoor outdoor thermometer to check.

4. Don’t put the oven on! Don’t cook anything that needs a long time. When you have cooked put the hot pan outside to stop it heating up the kitchen. Couscous is brilliant, as it needs just a small kettle of boiling water to cook it and left over couscous is great spiced up and eaten cold.

5. The simplest way to get cool is to wet your arms and face and sit in front of the fan. Soaking a t-shirt, wringing it out and then wearing it will keep you cool for ages. Wetted top sheet will help you sleep if it is really bad. Sitting with your feet in a basin of cold water helps swollen ankles .

5. Air conditioning is the obvious choice for many, but it eats electricity and that drives the problems that make the world hotter, so if you can: avoid.

Long term cooling solutions involve planting many many more shady trees . Trees can drop the temperature by 10 degrees and are of course beautiful. Painting roofs white make a big difference and not laying black tarmac everywhere makes urban areas more liveable. Fountains that people can splash in and walk through are wonderful.

Homes and offices need to lose all that glass that makes living in them literally like living in a green house. The fashion for endless glass is insane. Every new home I see with huge glass windows, has to quickly spend a fortune on blinds and curtains that are never never opened. A wall, is much cooler!!

Cooling Devices.

A) a bottle of water left over night in the freezer and then sat in your lap.

B) a gel neck scarf. The gel swells up in water over night and then cools your neck all day as you wear it. It isn’t wet on the skin, you can get all sorts of attractive patterns and it is definitely the best cheap cooling device.

C) a snap towel. I don’t know how these little towels work, but they certainly do. You wet the little towel a bit, shake it to make it snap and put it on your head or neck – very cool!

D) a neck fan. This is my latest acquisition. It looks like a pair of hipster ear phones around your neck. It charges with a usb lead and works for hours blowing air round your face. It is very light and brilliant when you are moving around.

Saving Water.

High temperatures generally mean a lack of rain and water shortages. To keep your plants alive, reuse your washing water!!

Bowls of water, that have washed dishes or hands, can be collected in a pail and used to water everything. Plants do not mind a bit of detergent/soap – in fact they love it!

Collecting shower water is difficult, but bath water is easy to collect if your bathroom is upstairs. Every evening, after a bath , I lower a pump connected to a hose pipe into the bath and pump the water straight out onto the vegetable patch or into a water butt for use later. I use bubble bath and the veg are fine! You need one person to keep an eye on the pump upstairs to turn off the electricity when the bath is empty.

I am sure many of you know all of these tricks, but this blog might just contain a new idea to keep you cool and keep your garden blooming in the dry and the heat.

Just January.

Watching my neighbour clean his windows is a note worthy event. The wind rattling the shutters is remarkable. The cat woke up in a bad mood and won’t be stroked because there is snow static in the air. I think a hen harrier flew by, but it might just be a seagull disoriented by being so very far from the sea. The news is always bad, or maybe it’s just funny like the electric spark from the end of the cat’s nose or the last leaf whirled skittishly from the bare tree or just January, just January leaving.

Lemonade

If the world gives you lemons make lemonade.

Just over a week from the devastating hailstorm that trashed the garden, there is some regrowth .

One courgette plant and one pumpkin plant survived and have put out very small new leaves. A few bush bean plants are still growing despite being splashed with mud. The stumps of lettuces have inspired a new ring of leaves and the bush fuchsia is making buds at the apex of each smashed stalk.

The roses are shocked out of summer and only a few undamaged buds have opened in stunned smallness . The peonies are long gone and even the stalwart ladies’ mantle is an unretrievable broken mass on the grass. I have been most surprised by the havoc reeked on the lavender, which was just budding and really shooting up. The hail has pockmarked virtually every flower stem and over the passing week they have slowly wilted and finally collapsed over the foliage.

I was going to throw a party to celebrate that fact that we are both now retired and survived many years of teaching. The garden has been my personal refuge, from the digitised soullessness horror of modern education. Now the garden gives me less pleasure, so I went to the co-op and bought some hanging fuchsias and begonias, new tomatoes plants, fennel and cabbage and parsley.

I thought trying an actual lemon plant would be pushing the metaphor way beyond its climatic boundaries.

I think the party will have to wait, until there has been more regrowth, but the lemonade jug is ready and waiting just in case!

In the shelter of a hedge.

This rose grows in the shadow of a thick hedge. It flowers each summer mostly ignored.

When a catastrophic hailstorm destroyed my garden a few days ago it was sheltered from the devastation and now its lone bloom is the most valued thing that there is left.

When we moved to our house 12 years ago, our new neighbours warned us about the hail storms that can trash everything in minutes and sighed at our desire to grow soft fruit and grapes. We listened politely and went ahead with planting raspberries and currants and vines. There were a few hail storms and one year we lost our potatoes, but nothing was too bad.

The thunder started early in the afternoon and went on for so long I just thought it was part of the music that was playing.

The hail stones were 2-3 cm in diameter. They broke plant pots, roof tiles and chipped off the plaster from the walls of the house. They bounced like ball barrings or frozen gob stoppers and smashed foliage as they fell. The lettuces were pulverised, the pumpkins, courgettes and green beans were pounded into the mud and the potato plants shredded into skeletons.

After spectacular lightening and yet more thunder, the heavens finally opened . Hail thundered down with a size and ferocity I have never encountered in any tropical country.

There is a single bud left on my lovely lilies . The peonies were atomised and my best ever year of roses were over in ten minutes of ice and biblical vengeance.

I have been clearing up as best I can but my garden is a very sorry sight.

The rose by the hedge was protected by the thick overhang and while the rest of the garden is broken and battered, this neglected rose escaped completely unharmed .

Gardens grow metaphors like weeds.

Scribbling life

A lichen is colonizing my step.

The autumn had been wet and by winter the concrete had decided it was time to show some life while everything else died down.

The garden is just hanging by a thread between snow falls and bone cracking hard frosts, but the lichen sensed that this was just the time to colonize and to spread out.

It might be the shape of a beating heart, or it might be just the shape of a lichen. The smallest satellites look like tentative kisses on a mirror .

The concrete has never looked more lovely or full of possibility under a snow filled sky.

Goodbye to the Ice Saints.

Yesterday was cold Sofia, the last of the ice saints day. May 15th is the fest day of Saint Sofia and traditionally the last really cold night of spring.
In this part of the world mid May is often surprizingly cold and no one who understands anything would put out a tender plant before that date for fear that frost would kill it. We have had hot February and March, warm April, but the first half of May has been true to the folk calendar: cold and wet!
The grass and the potatoes are loving this weather and the spring flowers have lasted spectacularly well, but I am watching the moon which seems full tonight. Full moon always heralds a change in the weather. The ice saints have had their season, Pixie the cat watched them go and now the warm weather can begin!

Spring snow.

Slip slushing snow whomping and whispering from the green leaves.
The stems are plump with life, turgid with sap. This white weight of winter is a foolish incumbrance to be shrugged away.
Hours of heavy snow bowed down the saplings and the tall nettles, it filled in the open tulips and blurred the gooseberries ripening on the prickle fringed bushes.
But enough is enough.
Spring slept under the heavy cold wet blanket for a night , a long night, of fatuous fretting about peonies and potatoes.
In the morning, spring time slowly stretched her arms, straightened the birch sapling bowed down to the wet ground and flung the unseasonable nonesense of snow off out into a surprised May morning!

Thermogenesis

Spring snow is always such a shock. Just when we are getting used to sunshine a  front sweeps in and brings wet cold, cold snow.

Thankfully it is short lived and most plants are little the worse for it. Some plants even seem to shrug off the snow before the thaw begins and they are the ones that catch my eye. The photo is of daisy flowers closed shut, but quite free of the just fallen snow. The only explanation can be that they produce their own heat that actually melts the surrounding snow. They are not alone: tulips, cabbages and winter wheat and many other plants are capable of  making heat to protect themselves from frost and snow. This phenomenon has been well studied in a few  plants world wide, but it is a remarkable ability that is shared by so many plants, which we only get to actually appreciate and recognise after pesky, shocking spring snow!

Thaw.

Loss is the sound of a skirt shaken; long hair tossed; snow shrugging from a dark winter pine and whispering down to the ground.

I walked in the thawing wood.

Everything was movement and sound and I felt as if I was walking in the company of multitudes shivering and sliding softly around me. At first the thaw was disorientating, too much movement and unexpected sound and then I became accustomed to the slippery urgency of snow falling into water, everywhere, all around, sliding.

Across the forest path: pigs, little ones, middle ones, aunties, mothers, utterly silent on tiny delicate feet. Fifteen wild boar passed noiselessly right in front of us and followed their line out across the damp snowy field: a line of  black piggy perfection against the waning white slush.

St Martins in the field – Oltingue.

There was ice on the path, the shape of a horse hoof in the half thawed mud and a broken twig of mistletoe. A tractor growled far away, a kite mewed over head.

In a very old church, a skeleton lay exposed to the infrequent congregation, oddly indecent amongst the pews. A prankster stole his skull a few years ago. They say.

On the altar spiders strung their careful webs between the wings of the praying angels and on the spotted altar cloth there was a delicately tied bundle of vine cuttings. Medieval faces of devoation, chipped off by irreligious revolutions, watched impassively as the year turned.

Outside, the churchyard is plump with the granite graves of gilded lettering and pyramids of winter flowers and unlit candles.

As I walked; (careful not to go withershins ) round the old church, brief sunlight illuminated an extraordinary scene on the exterior church wall. This opulent scene must have been covered over for hundreds of years. The old church has just been replastered as this scene of  Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem or heaven its self has just come to light again.

Everything is tantalisingly unclear. I can find nothing to explain it.

What do you see in it?

Delicacy.

The sun is up for such a brief moment. A bar of sunshine slants across the hill and inside all the dust of December is illuminated on glass and table and books. Outside the sparrows cluster to the unfreezing bread crumbs, blackbirds eat the half thawed windfall apples and a solitary goldfinch fluffs herself into the seed house to gorge in safety.

In some corners the sunlight never reaches at all and the frost forms thicker and thicker, riming each leaf with new flowers of ice, blooming delicately, quietly in the cold, still air.

First Fruits.

Cherries, red currants and raspberries: plump and red and ready!

Last year there wasn’t a cherry and there wasn’t a walnut after a catastrophic spring frost that destroyed so much fruit that no kirsch was distilled and virtually no grapes were harvested in the Alsace to make the wonderful perfumed wine.

This year has been blissfully different. Spring was late, but this meant that not a flower was lost to late frost and now the cherry trees are growning under the wieght of thick black cherries  and magpies are swaying in the boughs drunk on lucious ripe fruit.

My tiny cherry tree has a real crop for the first time. The red currants survived the monster hail storm and the raspberries escaped all dangers and have loved the heat and the extraordinary rain of the last few weeks. There is so much fruit to come that I hope there is space in the freezer to accommodate it all.

However the one thing gardening has taught me over and over again is how changeable life is, how precariously perfectly balanced for a single moment on the grass blade edge between feast and famine . I inhale and savour the first sweet raspberry!

 

Slow Business.

Earlier in the year I found a Roman snail shell close up for for the winter, safely sealed behind a calcerious  door. Well, spring is here and the snails are out and about, looking for love. On a damp Sunday afternoon, these two plump snails found each other and slowly, very slowly, did what snails do.

After their amorous interlude, they may have been tempted to go back to bed, as the temperature here has fallen dramatically in the last few days . It seems that the Ice Saints are back again; that strange dip in temperature that is well known in southern Germany and northern Switzerland during during the middle of May.

This odd blip in the temperature is named after the saints days that occur at this time . At the moment we are enjoying cold Kalt Sofia, but my favourite is Saint Pancreas, who is yet to arrive ( maybe there is the wrong type of ice on the tracks!).

 

https://wordpress.com/post/cathysrealcountrygardencom.wordpress.com/2625

 

 

Astonished.

Apparently this is now my third year of blogging on WordPress, which seems astonishing.

I started the blog on a cold wet day, when I just had to write about gardens to total strangers, to somehow compensate for the late spring.

The following spring was glorious, the best apple blossom I have ever seen and cherries already starting to form, when from a summer sky we had thick snow. Just as the snow melted, the temperatured plumeted and every flower and new leaf was coated in thick ice . The ice stayed for a day and a night and we lost every cherry, apple, plum and walnut of the year. It nearly broke my heart.

This year the spring was a little slow, but eventually the blackthorn came out, and now the cherries are in bloom again. They could all be frozen off for a second year, but the forecast is good. The sun is strong, the bees are out in force, even the rain has stopped.

So from my third year of blogging about the same garden in the same lovely corner of the earth, I send you pictures of the cherry trees and good wishes for a fruitful, peaceful year for us all!

 

 

Adaptability.

Last weekend there was forsythia blossom and frog spawn in the ditch and this weekend there is thick, thick snow covering over the world again.

Like Juliet’s father in Romeo and Juliet “ my fingers itch “ to be planting and tidying in a spring garden . However it is Pixie the cat on the warm radiator who understands real adaptability and the contentment that only cosseted cats can ever achieve!

Last week I found an old apple tree blown down in a storm. No over zealous farmer had tidied it away and chopped it up for fire wood ; the bole of exposed roots had made a new cliff of light horizontal out of what had once been vertical and deep. Moss and fungi had colonised the new surface, unidentifiable creatures had dug out homes: adaptability is everywhere – except in my itchy fingers!!

 

 

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Murmuration.

Some words are worth saying just for their sheer beauty  – murmuration is one.

Try saying it out loud and enjoy the rolling, soothing sound.

The word describes one of the great unexpected delights of bird watching: the huge, sweeping, boiling cloud that starlings form before they settle to roost in enormous numbers.

If you want to remind yourself of this magnificant fluid aerial spectacle, click on this link.

The last time I watched it was at Llangorse Lake in Powys Wales. For thirty incredible minutes the sky was alive with the twisting and blooming shapes of thousands upon thousands of noisy starlings wheeling and dancing before stettling suddenly in the reeds to sleep.  Not only was it visually extraordinary, but the noise that starlings make is as raucous and sociable as teenagers squealing with supressed news on the first day back at school .

My garden is still covered in snow and loud with competitive bird calls, as they squabble over apples and the last of the bird seed. The blackbirds cluck and fuss, the field fare hiss and stamp, but they all step back for the 30 boisterous starlings that periodically descend from the winter skies to hoover up everything going.

Starlings were once very common, but are now on the UK red list of endangered birds due to a dramatic and not fully understood decline. I can’t imagine they are doing any better just over the water here in France, so I am delighted to share my bumper bags of cheap Coop ugly apples with them.

They chatter, wheeze, pipe and trill to each other: a Twitter storm in the real world of real, beautiful birds in a cold early spring!

 

 

 

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Couscous and chicken for the birds.

The unusually low temperatures have continued here. It is the end of a long winter, the birds are tired and hungry and I have time, for once, to feed them.

The cold has brought new visitors. Gangs of blackbirds demolish the apples thrown out for them. Starlings have come to ground to flaunt their shiver of green sparkles against the dead grass. The marvellously painted goldfinches have finally discovered the niger seed feeder they have ignored all winter and a solitary field fare, puffed and fluffed against the cold eats sultanas and the apples left over by the black birds.

The sparrows can’t eat their crumbs fast enough before they freeze and I have taken to putting out hot couscous that stays unfrozen just long enough for them to eat it on their table.

As ever, the shops run out of bird seed at this time of year, as they are determined to sell us spring things, whatever the evidence of their eyes tell them to the contrary.

So I dug to the back of the food cupboard to find what I could use instead and came up with: dried figs (chopped up), raisins, sun flower kernels, oats and couscous ( cooked) and rice (cooked). I found soya beans which I boiled up. The birds wouldn’t touch them. I also threw two chicken legs  onto the shed roof, which wonders of wonders, tempted in a red kite and a buzzard !

Possibly the most useful thing I have contributed so far is a regular kettle of hot water into the tin tray that is my bird bath. As all the water is ice at the moment, birds really need something to drink and the circles of ice in the picture are the emptied offerings, which shows how long it has been cold. My reward, when  I was pouring the kettle, was the distant drumming of a woodpecker and the high, sweet mewing of a buzzard calling for a mate in the clear air.

 

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Patience.

Winter’s grip seems relentless.

After months and months of torrential rain, a few spring flowers tentatively appeared and then the real cold descended and stunned them into immobility. Shrunk by hard frosts, thin snow and polar days they lie flattened across frozen earth. Blackbirds fluffed to twice their normal size stab at apples from the supermarket and only the sedums are unmoved by the cold, waiting unperturbed in their perfect symmetry for the next season.

 

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Kaskhstan. All My Gardens Part 8

The strangest place I have ever tried to garden was Kazakhstan.

Our first apartment had two balconies. The first faced into the courtyard of the concrete blocks . It had a washing line and you could glimpse the steppe from the top floor as it rolled out, brown and flat to distant Russia. I realised that growing things here would be difficult when after a couple of seeringly  hot months my washing froze to cardboard cutout stiffness over night.

The other balcony was boxed in with wooden sides and glass. On the shelves there were still pickles and jams, left by some previous tenant, making use of the cold space to store carefully preserved food, as everyone used to do before the supermarkets came. There was no window sill for plants, but there was an extraordinary view of the Tian Shan mountains . This was Almaty, at the far south east tip of Kazakhstan, the old capital and the most stunningly located city sprawling between the snow capped mountains linked to the Himalayas in the south and the central Asian steppe to the north.

When I lived there remnants of the former USSR were every where, but so too was the newly independent Kazakhstan rediscovering its nomadic and Muslim roots.

In our first year we managed to grow nothing, but the school had a remnant apple orchard, which was so perfumed and perfect in the spring it made me cry. Almaty is supposed to be named after the father of apples and the genetic parent of all apple trees does apparently originate in the country.

Bonkers the magnificent came with us from Zambia and after a lot of bribery and some crying, we got him through customs in one piece. He hated the apartment, there were no chameleons to chase and indoor life did not suit him. We put him on a cat lead and took him to the orchard, but he collapsed as though his back was  broken and then escaped up a tree, only to be retrieved with a broom.

We found another apartment in the centre of the city . It had another boxed in balcony full of pickles under which trams rattled and shuddered. This was in the same street as the magnificent state opera house, which broadcast its music for free on summer evening to those who could not afford the tickets to the plush boxes, but who could listen to the outstanding performance on the street, cooled by the great glaciers fed fountains .  Bonkers preferred this apartment, as the balcony that faced the courtyard was laticed with bird cage wrought iron and he could catch a breeze while watching the bats plunge out of the plane trees and listen frustratedly to the scops owls calling in the summer time.

He was never allowed out, as he would not have found his way back up to our top floor home and there were rats bigger than he was by the bins. The rats grew plump on the bread left out by my neighbours who considered it a sin to throw bread away and so it was left carefully off the floor for whoever, or what ever may need it.

To assuage his terrible yowling I ocassionally carried him down to the courtyard, where he would be admired by neighbours who would bring their own imprisoned moggies to their own windows to be introduced in a mixture of Russian, Kazakh, English and German.

On the bird cage balcony I grew red geraniums; hung spider plants and tradescantia and grew the best sweet peas ever, trailing up the iron work until the summer heat burnt them off . French marigolds grew well and a jasmine reminded me of Zambia and of Greece. Everything had to come in before the temperatures crashed for the long cold winter, the double glazing closed and the city wide heating  turned our sunny kitchen into a greenhouse.

I remember tiny bunches of the first real  flowers from the steppe: miniture  tulips and irises sold by old ladies infront of the cathedral on my birthday and wishing I could explore more of the steppe myself, and feeling the cold air falling from the mountains on my back and wishing I could really explore them too.

We explored the balcony and watched an extraordinary city instead.

 

ALL MY GARDENS PART 7 : ZAMBIA .

https://cathysrealcountrygardencom.wordpress.com/2018/03/10/down-to-earth-in-switzerland-all-my-gardens-part-9

 

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First Sunday in Advent with cats

It it was snowing outside and warm inside.

 

That’s it!

It’s all gone Pete Tong!

Spring and a lot of the world seems to have gone seriously Pete Tong (wrong)! Yesterday there was a blizzard. Gigantic fat flakes of white that just got warm enough to melt a little and coat the whole garden in water, before the night time temperature crashed and everything was encased in ice.

The buds of the vine are destroyed, my peonies are mush, the hydrangea is dead to half its height , the wonderful flush of apple blossom is crisped and brown and my loves lies bleeding is collapsed and white.

And that is just the garden.

Don’t get me started on the rest of the world !!!

Something in the woods knows spring is coming.

The world is still rebounding from the flattening snow, but hellebores that have been slowly unfolding in the woods all winter long, are ready for spring.