Life in the great outdoors

No, not wild camping in the hills or trekking across a desert somewhere, but days on end in the garden, as I try to pack a summer’s worth of gardening into a few weeks, before we head off across the Channel in a fortnight’s time. The cool, showery weather in my last post was followed by a surprisingly windy few days, but things have now settled down to be warmer, dry and calm – ideal weather for gardening.

Once DH had fired up the ride-on mower and tamed the hayfield that our lawn had become, it was time to tackle the flowerbeds. For some reason the delightful previous owners of our house seem to have had a love affair with privet, with the result that two out of three of the flowerbeds were dominated by disproportionately large privet bushes.

To get my hand in, I decided to tackle the smaller one first, so on a day in May, I roped in DH to help. After a titanic struggle with the aid of a winch (yes, really!) we succeeded in dragging the privet bush out of the ground, roots and all, and I set to work to make the bed ready for more ornamental occupants. These I largely acquired at the village church’s plant sale last Saturday and they are now safely ensconced in their new home with plenty of space to grow and spread.

In between times I've been making inroads on the much bigger privet bush which takes up nearly half of the larger bed at the far end of the garden. It’s far too big to repeat our previous uprooting success, so I’m hacking it back until we can see the roots and decide how we want to tackle their extraction.

For light relief I’ve also started work on the other half of the bed, which is a mass of mint run wild, creeping buttercup and nettles. There is no way this bed will be ready for planting before we go to France, but if I can at least get rid of the great mass of invasive weeds, it will be much easier to work with when we get home in September. This garden has the potential to be a really lovely place and I’m enjoying starting to get it into shape and planning for the future.

If there were any justice I should be sylphlike after all this hard work, but failing that I am at least more flexible and I sleep like a log!  The morning mist has lifted now and the sun has come out, so if you’ll excuse me I’m off out into the garden…

Going...

  

Going...

Gone!

Where to plant them...?

Safely bedded in

I may not be able to kneel, but at least I can still bend.

Grrr... Those dratted mint roots!

An unexpected crop of ready-minted potatoes!

Just to prove we DO have colour in the garden...

On the road again

It’s Saturday morning and I am typing this in an empty house, the only sounds the clicking of the keys and the wind lashing the rain against the window next to my desk. Yesterday afternoon I waved DH off on another of his regular visits to his very elderly mother and after clearing a few chores headed out into the garden.

Earlier in the week a good friend had presented us with a delayed house-warming gift, a bare-rooted rose bush which needs to be planted without delay. Unfortunately the perfect position was already occupied by a battered, unsightly and very spiny berberis, which it was my unwelcome task to remove. The struggle was fierce, but ultimately I prevailed and managed to complete digging the hole for my rose as twilight fell.

The berberis had its revenge, however, and I spent much of the rest of the evening with a sharp needle, extracting the numerous thorns which had made it through my strongest gardening gloves. This morning my poor hands look as though I have a very localised attack of measles, but at least I’m ready to sally forth into the garden as soon as the rain stops and the ground dries up a little, and bed the rose comfortably into its new home.

After that my busyness will take a different direction, as I get down to the preparations for our spring trip to the north coast of Scotland. DH will be home on Monday evening and by then I need to have everything ready for us to pack the car on Tuesday morning and begin our journey with our customary overnight visit to his brother in Southport.

I’m already looking forward eagerly to the long journey up through the Highlands. The road is familiar to us now and we drive it with huge pleasure, revelling in the grandeur of the scenery, whatever the weather, and keenly anticipating our arrival in our little home from home between the mountains and the sea. Easter in the Highlands has become part of our lives over the past few years and I can hardly wait.

Who needs a gym?

Not me, at least not when I’ve got a battered French garden to get back into shape. Once last weekend’s rain was over and I’d paid my first visit to my Monday afternoon craft group, this week has passed in a flash. I’ve spent much of each day in the fresh air, wrestling the mower over the mess the cattle have made of our ground. Already I feel fitter and ache less in the mornings, so perhaps I shouldn’t be cross with the beasts for doing what comes naturally.

I’m not referring to the inevitable cowpats, since any gardener knows that a bit of well-rotted manure is not to be sniffed at. It’s the inches-deep holes punched by their hooves which have made life so difficult this week. Some of them are big enough to trap the mower’s front wheels, making progress very stop-and-start and sometimes achingly slow and tiring.

It’s only now that most of the grass has had its first, high cut that I can assess the extent of the damage and I use that word advisedly. Mowing our uneven ground has never been easy, but the current unevenness is off the scale in comparison with previous years. In fact a few areas of the garden – under the trees and in the lee of the house – resemble nothing so much as small-scale buffalo wallows, created when the poor animals huddled in what shelter they could find during the terrible weather we (and they) endured last winter.

In order to stop the unwary visitor (or indeed DH and me) ricking an ankle, I’m busy filling all the holes with grass cuttings, topped off with the fine soil the moles have so kindly provided for me. Elegant it isn’t, but the cuttings will rot down and the grass will eventually grow back through, as I’ve proved in various parts of the garden in previous years. In the meantime, much of what passes for our lawn looks like it’s suffering from a virulent attack of measles or smallpox and certainly won’t win any prizes for best-kept garden in the foreseeable future.

 

Humps, bumps and aching muscles

On a  more cheerful note, I’ve given my little flower border a jolly good forking-over and weeding and have planted out the new plants I brought with me. To do this I had to dig holes in parts of the border which have never been thoroughly dug, which has resulted in another fine crop of stones being brought to the surface. It appears to be impossible to stick a fork in the ground here without hitting a stone, so my arm muscles  (and my patience) have been having even more exercise.

New rockery anyone?

Progress IS being made

Now it’s time for a well-earned break. Tomorrow we will be out all day, enjoying what will certainly be an extended lunch with old friends, followed by a concert in the evening featuring an a capella women’s choir in the fine church in Saint Hilaire-du-Harcouët. I shan’t know myself in something other than my gardening clothes.

At the weekend our neighbouring commune up the hill will be celebrating its fête communale and commemorating the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of this area. Despite a less than promising weather forecast for Saturday at least, DH and I will enjoy joining in with some of the events, though we draw the line at a dance that doesn’t even start until 11.30pm! We know our limits…

Putting down roots again

…in more ways than one. We spent a very enjoyable few days, first with DH’s mother and then with DS and his family 

Father and son and the dog that tried to drink the river dry

and finally boarded the ferry on Monday afternoon in brilliant sunshine. After a crossing as calm as the proverbial millpond and a slow and stately journey up hill and down dale (the van was very heavily laden this time) we finally arrived not long before midnight.

Brushing aside the cobwebs (the spiders really have been busy over the winter) we fell into bed and woke up next morning to another warm,  sunny day, perfect for starting to clean the house and empty the van. While DH hoovered up cobwebs, I started to unpack bags and boxes and try to remember where I’d stored their contents in previous summers.

This familiar routine was rudely interrupted when I switched on the bread machine to make some fresh bread, whereupon there was a loud crackle and sparks flew out from round the base, together with a strong smell of burning! I hadn't any choice but to turn all the ingredients into a mixing bowl and by following the instructions on the back of the flour packet I managed to produced a very authentic-looking and really tasty boule – a traditional round French loaf. I even got the crust crisp by doing the ‘tin with water on the floor of the oven’ trick. I can see making bread by hand becoming a regular occupation.

Back we went to work, only to be interrupted again, very pleasantly this time, by the arrival of an old friend with a welcome present of eggs fresh from their hens, which of course gave us a wonderful excuse to sit down for a coffee and a good long chat.

The days since then have fallen into our customary settling-in pattern of cleaning and sorting out the house and beginning to tackle the garden. The travelling pelargoniums are safely settled in their pots and my little flower border has survived the winter remarkably well. Once I’ve had time to tidy it thoroughly and the new plants I brought with me have bedded in, it should look rather pretty. The grass is another matter.

Back in their familiar blue pots

As I've mentioned before, our so-called lawn is the remains of an old orchard, which is grazed all winter by our neighbour’s young stock and frequented by some of the most active moles I’ve had the misfortune to encounter. The combination of mole-hills and cowpats makes mowing an interesting experience at the best of times, but add to the mix the results of one of the wettest winters on record and mowing the grass may turn into an endurance sport.

The very small campervan up to its hocks in grass

As the cattle milled around on the saturated grass trying to find shelter from the endless rain and wind, their hooves must have sunk into the ground over and over again, each time compressing a neat little hollow, surrounded by a crater rim, both of which have now hardened in the last few weeks of sunshine to the consistency of concrete. It makes walking across the long grass feel like traversing a cobbled street and trying to mow starts to resemble pushing a heavy weight across corrugated iron. It’s a good thing French mowers are built for rough ground!

I hardly dare say this after the winter we've had, but what it really needs is a good long soaking to soften the topsoil so that I can level off the humps and bumps. Unfortunately all we've had so far is a couple of light showers, though this may change over the weekend, if the forecast is to be believed.

Still, it’s good to be back and to realise that my French is getting better year by year, so that I can chat to the newsagent and read the local paper without feeling the need to reach for a dictionary. It’s good to have been invited to lunch by friends we met in our first summer here and to watch the cherries gradually ripening and even to catch a glimpse of one of the cats in the distance. It’s good to be back.

Taming the jungle

I’d better make it plain from the start that this won’t be a post full of beautiful garden photos. The main reason for this is that we don’t have a beautiful garden in Wales. In fact after two months away during the best summer for garden growth the UK has seen for years, we barely have a recognisable garden at all and certainly not one I want to take my camera out into.

Oh, the shrubs and plants are still where we left them in June, but the former have mushroomed so alarmingly, and the latter been so overshadowed by what must surely be mutant weeds, that DH and I feel like a geriatric Tarzan and Jane as we struggle to bring some order back into our surroundings. As for the Wild Wood, it has grown so tangled we’re considering renaming it the Wild Jungle and only venturing in there roped together.

Luckily the weather continues to be fine, if much colder today, but my back is starting to creak and I keep taking breaks to catch up with my backlog of blog reading. Meanwhile DH is doing urgent research into the purchase of a seriously powerful brush and grass cutter before the barn across the yard disappears from sight completely. The task of taming the wilderness has taken on a tinge of desperation, since my cataract operation is now only a fortnight away and gardening is on the list of forbidden activities in the immediate post-op period.

Still, the vigorous bending and stretching I’m doing will help to counteract the effects of a summer of French cheese and wine and I’ve just put in a list of book requests on the library website to while away the autumn evenings as the days draw in. It’s good to be to home in Wales for a while. Now where’s that sock I’m knitting for DD?

Image via Google 

Wind in the Willows be blowed!

Kenneth Grahame has a lot to answer for. Having read and loved The Wind in the Willows as a child, I grew up with a roseate image of Mole which I’m now telling you couldn't be further from the truth. If a small, short-sighted, furry creature were ever to show his nose in my Normandy garden, I’d probably chase him away with my garden fork, that being the implement which barely left my hand for much of this summer.

When we arrived at the end of June, the grass in the garden was approaching knee-high, which meant putting my sturdy mower on its highest setting to prevent it clogging up completely. At first all went well, though emptying the capacious grass collector at the end of every couple of passes was hard work, but then I came to the area under the trees. Instantly my relatively smooth progress was punctuated with sudden bursts of metallic clinking as earth and stones spattered the underside of the mower. Yes, I’d hit yet another hidden mole-hill!

Who knew what was lurking beneath the green?

After much cursing and sweating the first cut of the grass was finished and the full extent of the devastation was revealed. I don’t know why the long cold winter and spring were so conducive to mole activity in southern Normandy, but the fact remains that the grass under the fruit trees looked like an ancient battlefield, full of humps and bumps and bare patches of earth. If I wanted to get the grass shorter than the five inches I’d already achieved, I’d have to get down and dirty to clear the concrete-hard mounds laboriously by hand.

No faking here and this was only one corner

It was scant comfort to find at the next garden club meeting that I was by no means the only victim of mole subversion. Garden owners preparing for a visit by the club sent out warnings to the members to wear stout shoes and be prepared for less than perfect lawns this time. The otherwise welcome hot weather didn't help either, as the sun baked the mole-hills to an even stonier consistency, making their levelling a form of not-so-subtle torture to my aching back.

However, Perpetua is made of stern stuff and I refused to let myself be beaten by Monsieur Taupe and his works. By the time DD and her family arrived in early August, every one of the three dozen or so mole-hills which had greeted me had been flattened more or less and the garden could again be used to play our version of crazy boules, though with a few more obstacles than usual.

Because we are only here for a few months of the year, my garden in Normandy will never be more than an expanse of uneven grass and a rather small flower border by the house, which is why I so enjoy the garden visits arranged by the garden club. I only managed to make it to two of the monthly meetings this time, but hopefully a small selection of the photos I took will give you a taste of the wonders achieved by others with far more time, skill and stamina than I possess.

First came a visit to the Manoir de Saussey near the west coast.

The Manoir de Saussey and its wonderful garden

I do like a good vista

Such noble limes

Lost in a green shade

A very French courtyard garden

I love the hidden corners

The next visit was to a private garden only a few miles from our cottage, but in a different world of age and scale.

Mirror image

A French knot garden

My kind of kitchen garden

Granite - the bedrock of southern Normandy

P.S. With many thanks to Kerry Dwyer, who gave me the link, here is the inimitable Jasper Carrott with an animated cartoon of his famous mole sketch. Enjoy.......

The Tale of the Travelling Pelargoniums

Once upon a time, on a market stall in a little French town, there stood a tray of six small, pink-flowered pelargonium plants. They were surrounded and overshadowed by other bigger, flashier (and more expensive) plants, but nevertheless, one sunny morning they were seen and bought by a summer visitor, who wanted to add a splash of colour and beauty to the front of her little house.

Planted out in two big blue ceramic pots, the pink pelargoniums blossomed happily all summer and when the time came for the summer visitor to depart, instead of being abandoned to be killed by the first frost, the were transplanted into smaller pots and taken across the sea to spend the winter in an old Welsh farmhouse.

That was three years ago, and each summer since then, the travelling pelargoniums, no longer small but still beautifully pink, have been carefully brought back to France and planted out in the same big blue pots, to blossom and brighten up the doorway of the little French house. J

Standing guard by the door

One of the problems of trying to garden in a place where I don’t live all the time is keeping plants alive. In our absence our big patch of former orchard is grazed intermittently by a few of our neighbour’s cattle, which at least keeps the grass within bounds much of the time. 

Unfortunately cattle are just as partial to some nice flowering plants as they are to a swathe of juicy grass, if not more so. This means that before we leave each autumn, DH and I have to construct a temporary barrier of branches to protect the little flower border so lovingly created by my mother-in-law two years ago.

Gardening keeps you young

The branches do a sterling job of keeping the cattle away, but sadly they don’t do the same for the weeds, and by the time we return each June, the flower border has all but vanished under a carpet of invaders. Nothing daunted, once we've evicted the spiders and unpacked, and I've planted out the pelargoniums, I make it my next task to banish the weeds and rescue the border, before turning my attention to taming the hayfield lawn.

The weeds make a bid for dominance

The battle is worth it

Some people might find it odd that I work so hard all summer to weed and mow and make the garden as lovely as I can, only to turn my back on it for the next nine months, and have to start all over again next year. I don’t see it that way at all.

One of my most pleasurable occupations during our summers in France is working outside in the garden. I actually love the mowing and get more healthy exercise this way than at any other time of the year. I enjoy finding out which plants will survive neglect to blossom faithfully each summer in my little flower border, and I take pride in the fact that my travelling pelargoniums continue to flourish year after year, flowering happily both in the French sunshine and in my Welsh kitchen. They may make unusual travelling companions, but it works for us.

A splash of colour and beauty

Where did August go?

As I staggered in from the garden earlier this evening, having just mowed over a quarter of an acre with my trusty push-mower, I realised that we are almost in September and most people probably think I’ve done a midnight flit. J I’ve actually been feeling the first stirrings of blog inspiration again recently and will be back with a real post very soon, but I just wanted to show a sign of life and say thank-you for not forgetting about me altogether.

We have friends coming to stay early next week and after this will come the slow winding down of this latest summer in Normandy. As so often at this time of year, the weather is becoming beautifully sunny and golden, making it hard to think of uprooting ourselves and heading back across the Channel. But the ferry is booked and the diary is starting to fill with things to do when we get home, so we plan to enjoy these final days in France as much as we can, before packing our life into the very small campervan and taking it home again to Wales.

So as the leaves on the trees – cherry, apple and poplar - turn to gold and start to fall, I’ll leave you with a reminder that France is indeed another country, with a beautiful language I have yet to master completely after more than 50 years of trying….

Gone fishin’

Image via Wylio

…or at least gardening. Here in Mid-Wales summer arrived overnight yesterday and I can’t afford to waste it indoors. One of the downsides to our peripatetic lifestyle is trying to keep three gardens in some kind of order and this hasn't been helped  by the cold and wet weather we’ve had for so long. Suddenly the mid-day temperature has leapt from below 10C to above 20 (50F to 70 for my transatlantic readers) and I've shed several layers of clothing at a stroke. Even better, the five-day weather forecast shows more of the same on the way, so the gardening tools are out and the weeds better brace themselves for imminent destruction. I’ll catch up when I’m too tired to pull a weed or push a mower, but until then I’ll leave you to savour this gem from the immortal Porgy and Bess.

Normal service will be resumed shortly

For the first time since I started blogging back in February, I’ve discovered that sometimes life just takes over and blogging has to take a back seat for a while.

In the three weeks since I last posted, we’ve arrived in Normandy, evicted the spiders and reminded ourselves how the wood burner works. In fact it was so cold and wet when we got here that we checked the calendar to make sure it really was mid-June and not mid-March. Since then we’ve been settling in, meeting up with friends we haven’t seen since last year and enjoying having DH’s mother staying with us for her annual visit to France. 

As soon as the rain stopped and things started to dry off, I also found myself expending considerable time and effort mowing the hayfield which was threatening to engulf the house. Actually, mowing the grass is one of the jobs I really enjoy here – fresh air, healthy exercise and the illusion that I’m creating a lawn out of a patch of bumpy and overgrown orchard. Meanwhile, my doughty, 87-year-old mother-in-law has been busy digging out a narrow flower border along the front wall of the house, which we have today planted out with lavender and calendula and London Pride.

Talking of orchards, I’ve also been enjoying another of my favourite occupations this week. At the local gardening club on Tuesday I was given an unexpected, but very welcome, invitation to help myself to a friend’s remaining raspberries and blackcurrants, as she’d already picked all they could possibly use.  This meant of course that I had to spend the next day turning them into jam, with the aid of my trusty, travelling jam pan. Stop laughing over there – you should know that there are some things one simply can’t leave behind for three months – especially in summer.

So nothing exciting, but all very pleasant, and absorbing enough to leave me with very little thinking time.  Assisi isn’t forgotten, but will just have to wait a little longer. Oh – and there are cherries to pick and kittens in the woodshed to watch….

The Wild Wood

Long, long ago, when the world was young – or at least when DH and I were young – we moved with our two small children into an old and decrepit farmhouse high in the hills of Mid-Wales. It came with about half an acre of neglected ground, part would-be garden, part a small, steep, infertile paddock above the house to the north.

In my first flush of enthusiasm at having space to grow things, I started a vegetable plot in the garden behind the house, with some modest success. The following year I decided to try to clear the paddock by planting potatoes there, but the ground is so steep and the soil so poor that this was an experiment I wasn’t tempted to repeat. So the paddock lay fallow for a couple of years, until DH managed to set it alight during the great drought of 1976 and we nearly lost our few trees as well.

Once we had recovered from the shock, we decided something different had to be done with this poor patch of ground, and the sight of our singed trees gave DH a brainwave.  He would plant trees! Lots of trees, beautiful specimen conifers (DH loves conifers) which would fill up the paddock and enhance our surroundings. Well, that was the idea….

Unfortunately, when he went to the local tree nursery for his infant conifers, they happened to be having a sale of larch seedlings at a giveaway price. You can guess the rest. Being of Scottish ancestry and therefore not one to sniff at a bargain, DH went mad and bought about fifty of the baby larches, in addition to all the specimen conifers he had already chosen.

Back in those days I worked in a public library, so my first instinct when faced with dozens and dozens of seedling trees was to bring home a book on their planting and care. It was written by a tree specialist, so one might have thought DH would welcome advice from such a reliable source. Not a bit of it! The writer stressed the importance of preparing the ground before planting. DH simply dug lots of small holes. The writer emphasised how essential it was to give trees plenty of room to grow and even provided a useful chart of planting distances, based on eventual height. DH just looked at the seedlings, particularly the tiny larches, and planted them really, really close together, so they would have company. 

It should have been a recipe for disaster, and in terms of a formal garden, I suppose it was. The first surprise was just how quickly the seedlings established themselves and grew. Given the poor soil and exposed position of the paddock, we rather expected to lose many, if not most, of them in the first few winters. Gripped by frost, buried in snow, battered by south-westerly gales they might have been, but nothing seemed to deter them. They just grew and grew and grew. Even though they were so closely packed in places that their branches became entangled and they had to strain upwards to the light, still they managed to grow, until today, nearly 35 years later, many of them are towering 40-footers.

Naturally some have succumbed over the years, but they don't go to waste. Indeed, one fine afternoon earlier in the week we were up in the wood, where DH had just sawn up a dead tree, carting the logs down the hill to be split and stored for firewood. As we always find ourselves doing when we’re up there, we kept stopping work to take in the atmosphere of the place: the slanting sunbeams, the sound of the wind high in the treetops mingling with the muted song of birds tuning up for spring.

We stood looking downhill through the trees, down past the house to the wonderful view of the valley and the distant hills, and realised yet again that we have inadvertently created our very own Wild Wood. Tiny, it is true, and not exactly well tended, but with its trees and bushes and brambles a haven for wildlife, a playground for children, and, in its own small way, a magical and mysterious place, where one feels a million miles away from the outside world. It isn’t what we set out to make all those years ago, when DH brought home so many baby trees, but it is living proof that sometimes what happens by accident is better than we could ever have planned.