Some people think I'm bonkers...

...and they're probably right, but there is method in the madness.

A very exciting day today in the new vegetable garden. After all the long haul of rotivating, installing irrigation, laying the calade (paving), spreading wood ash and sheep manure came the fun bit...

We're calling it a potager, and placed as it is in the heart of the garden, it needs to look good. But not in a Villandry [row upon row of inedible ornamental cabbages, more hedges than beds] or Rosemary Verey (vegetables something of a garnish to yet more sodding roses) way. In a smart, practical way.

So I've formalised the layout with a box plant symetrically placed at each corner of the calade. I lifted them from the storage beds by the compost heap and carefully wrapped the roots in damp hessian. So far so good, so normal...

The biggest challenge to freshly moved plants is dessication - however careful you are it's impossible not to damage some of the microscopic root hairs that draw water from the soil. So the leaves wilt and look miserable for a bit. Or die. A bit of a lottery. So when the sun came out and the wind blew ("good drying weather" Mum would call it when she was doing laundry) I panicked...

The best way to stop plants drying out is to keep the wind off them and dampen the atmosphere... so I watered my precious box, and then as it got hotter and I kept working, steadily shed layers of clothing. Well, a T shirt lying uselessly on the ground when it could be put to much better use....

More photos of from the end of the day here

Blogging backwards... the front of the backlog!

Old olives on the main lawn - sudden shafts of light and
piles of silvery branches strewn about gave the garden
 a strange underwater atmosphere

A procession of ominously titled men have invaded the garden of late. Perhaps I have seen too many horror films, but the annoucement that “‘The Olive Man’ will be with us shortly” sent a shiver down my spine. 

He did the kind of pruning job that we lowly gardeners can only dream about... spend all day up trees in the sunshine, using powered secateurs (hydraulic?), and then waltzed off into the sunset, leaving someone else (i.e. us) to clear up!

It’s an old cliché.. owners ending up looking like their dogs. Well The Olive Man definitely has something of the olive about him... small and round, with bright dark eyes and shiny skin. The Cypress Man  - who comes to trim the huge Italian Cypresses at the front of the house - is accordingly tall and springy. He arrived in a tiny Renault with huge ladders strapped to the roof, doubling its length. And a gorgeous little terrier cross called ‘Beeper’!

everybody say "ahhhh...."

A splash of colour

Yesterday I woke from my siesta to the sound of wind whistling through the cypress tree that grows just outside my bedroom. I rushed straight out, my thoughts firmly on closing the cold frames, looked up and was astounded.

People often write, mainly in clichés elegant or otherwise, about the ‘intense’ ‘dazzling’ ‘mesmerising’ blue of the sky in Provence. Coming from London where the sky is often just a grey smudge between buildings, I tend not to pay much heed. Yesterday was different. 

Suddenly the normal view of rolling foothills, (the last of the Alps as they crash haphazardly down to the Mediterranean, their feet lost in haze), was gone. Instead, a flattened and sharpened view, almost as if it had suddenly become 2D - hard angles everywhere of jutting cypresses and their deep shadows. The customary smudge of sea fading to sky across the horizon replaced by a hard blue line, Prussian Blue sea to azure sky.

So, ‘this is the Mistral’ I thought. It’s the wind that drove Van Gogh mad - but here, sheltered as we are by the escarpment, we escape its worst effects almost entirely. But I'm still gobsmacked by the way it changes the light and how clear it makes the air. When it was at its height, Corsica appeared in the far distance - which according to Google Earth is over 100 miles away!

Already bright colour suddenly become supersaturated - the whole world looks like it’s been photoshopped. Beautiful wild anemones in shine deep red in the meadows and I made a surprising discovery digging the potager - a turgid little bit of rhubarb sprouting shocking pink underground from a discarded root.

Nervous..

Ever wondered what £60-worth of Pelargonium x ardens looks like? 


Me neither. 


But here they are - see left.


It’s a wonderful plant, deep maroon flowers edged in finest scarlet. We got ours from the lovely pelargonium specialists Woottens of Wenhaston. Hopefully they'll look like this before too long: 

They're notoriously difficult to propagate and establish - hence the price. I’ve killed several in my time - it’s not like the bedding geraniums (zonal pelargoniums to the pedantic) which don’t mind you going on holiday. Over-watering, under-watering - this one will notice instantly and spite you by dying. Not just wilting a bit to make you feel guilty - but properly, expensively, dead.

So it was with great relief that I planted them out today, from their tiny, vulnerable-to-just-one-hot-afternoon 9cm pots, to big pots with Aeonium 'Schwartzkopf' for company. Its rich shiny blackish leaves will pick up the maroon in the petals. And very nice they look too.

All shook up.. Freshest Breath Ever

Mayor in Flowers. Note the <ahem>
appendages. Someone favour hunting?

Sunday brought us to the Violet Festival at the nearby village of Tourettes sur Loup. Warm sunshine and coachloads of Italian Grannies on a cross-border jolly.  Stall after stall of violet-related tat and vaguely edible violet related foodstuffs. And some fantastically misleading pot-pourri that looked like sweets and had names like ‘Acid Fruits’ and of course ‘Violet’


Which I, accidentally, ate.

Luckily for me so did the French bloke standing next to me. We both pulled faces worthy of an Edvard Munch painting and fell about laughing. Schadenfreude isn’t always justified but I think it was sufficiently mutual to not count against my karma this time!

I woke up later that night from a deep sleep, dreaming I was being shaken from my bed. As I woke I realised it wasn’t a dream and I was actually being shaken. Puzzled, I looked around the room to no avail.  The following morning the news proclaimed France’s biggest earthquake in sixty years, 4.9 on the Richter Scale. I felt a bit cheated having spent aaaages in New Zealand, one of the most seismically active countries on the planet, and having felt not even the teeniest tremble; and then to be shaken from my bed in an old French house below a huge cliff strewn with massive boulders, well....

Sharons in the snow back in Jan

ANYWAY... this is supposed to be a gardening blog so... what’s been going on... Well I had my first ‘acid test’ if you like... the chance to show what I know to instant effect.  On the terrace below the new vegetable garden there is a line of persimmon trees (sharon fruits), which had been horribly hacked in the past. The poor things had been brutally attacked and lost all their natural grace and beauty. It’s a statutory lesson in fruiting trees - to put it simply they only fruit once they’ve “finished growing” - i.e. they’ve established their framework of branches and settled down to the business of reproduction. Cut into them hard and they behave like petulant teenagers; they grow back fast, get gangly and achieve very little!

So under the watchful expert eye of C I began cutting away all this spindly leafy growth, to expose what was left of the structure of the trees and give the fruiting wood some space.

They look tonnes better but I know it will be a fight. It takes time for trees to recover from that kind of shock. I’ll be up a ladder in May rubbing out the buds of those pesky teenagers as they try to regain lost ground, but it’ll be worth it in the autumn - when with any luck the display of big, gaudy, waxy, bright orange fruits (true ‘Sharons’ of the fruit world) will be even better than last year’s. Wish me luck....

Before. Persimmon/sharon fruits to the left.

Better pic to follow!

Here Comes the Sun

It really has warmed up, and with the warmth other senses are awakened. Suddenly the garden is full of sound - birds singing their hearts out, the rustle of tiny lizards along sunny walls; and with the water finally turned back on there is the sudden rush of fountains too.  It’s a bit like Narnia after the White Witch is defeated!

However... there really is no time for mawkish fantasy - there are lots of very real, very manly jobs to be done. Like finding rocks, splitting them, hauling them across vertiginous garden slopes, driving them round the property in the pickup truck*, and mixing concrete. We’re laying paving in the new vegetable garden - the eventual idea is to pave the entire area between the beds, which keeps the amount of fiddly, difficult-to-maintain grass paths to a minimum. 

C, as our resident native Frenchman, has suggested calade, a traditional Provençal technique that involves placing pieces of local stone (here a warm honey-grey limestone) in a bed of sand and cement. Basically posh crazy paving. It’s not finished but it already looks wonderful - a statutory lesson in using local materials and matching them to the surroundings.

I did manage to escape and sow more early salads in the cold frame - rows of spinach, mesclun, oak-leaf lettuce, Early Nantes carrots, red mustard, rocket, mizuna... and the magnificent-sounding Radicchio ‘Palla Rossa Precoce’ - as cut and come again, bit of an experiment. It is described in the seeds of Italy catalogue as ‘tight compact redhead’ - sounds more like a person than a veg to me.




* another 'in at the deep end moment' - my first time driving the truck was reversing up three switchbacks with half a tonne of stone in the back.

Gardening Unplugged

Gardeners have lots of enemies. Slugs, birds, inclement weather, fungal diseases.... all manner of things physical, metaphysical or otherwise can thwart even the best laid plans. My personal hit-list now includes the cordless drill.

Someone, name unknown, unplugged my precious propagator full of tiny tomatoes to recharge the drill. It reminds me of the urban myth of a hospital in America that had what became known as ‘The Bed of Death’... 


Patients in one particular bed in the Intensive Care unit kept on dying. Nobody could figure out why. Eventually the managers became so perplexed that they installed CCTV.  Lo and behold, every time the cleaner came to polish the floor, which life support machine was unplugged to power up the hoover....? You’ve guessed it.

Tiny seedlings of tender things like tomatoes are especially vulnerable to sudden dips in temperature, so the cosseted environment of a heated propagator is perfect for them [if like most people you just get them going on a windowsill, make sure you tuck curtains or blinds behind them at night]. Looks like we were lucky, it was a warm night and my ‘Gardener’s Delight’ are coming up like cress...