Edible Heaven

M said to me the other day "Do you think we've enough tomatoes?" To which I replied "errr" (knowing full well it was a rhetorical question and we have more than it's possible to eat).  33 puny little seedlings back in March have become a veritable forest of plants that regularly need re-staking because of the weight of the fruit.

And what tomatoes they are! Of the eight varieties we've grown, the undoubted showstopper has been 'Black Krim' (top left)- a huge tomato of indeterminate colour that's utterly impossible to buy as it's the savoury equivalent of a really ripe peach. Absolutely un-transportable, they're squashy, soft and so flavourful they literally stopped me in my tracks the first time I ate one. They can get to the size of a small grapefruit and are never regularly shaped.

Trusty 'Sungold' (top centre) are the other end of the spectrum - tiny; extremely sweet, yet a little tart at the same time.  Fantastic on a pizza with lashings of our own olive oil. Bon appétit!

Land of the giants

Summer's scorching, shimmering heat brings big things to the south of France. Not least the super-yachts and enormous cruise liners that I watch daily from the garden as they wallow lazily across the horizon, white blobs in the haze where I'd forgotten there was sea.

In the garden too, there are outsize happenings.... including my pumpkins (Musquée de Provence) -  two seeds planted on the old compost heap (a great tip if you have the space) -  have now become a mountain of leaves 35ft across, still expanding rapidly...

All these giant plants got me thinking as I was weeding some newly planted echiums the other day. It struck me as I steadily got more and more contact dermatitis from handling them; it felt just like when I was weeding the borage in the potager the day before. They’re family, of course....

Our humble European borage is a coarse, weedy-looking plant with dazzling blue flowers essential for the perfect Pimms. It’s really nothing to look at (apart from when surrounded by sweet alcohol and chopped fruit).  But, strand its ancestors on a rocky volcanic outcrop in the middle of the Atlantic for a couple of million years and you get something truly spectacular.

Photo courtesy of flickr ID: dcols. Echium wildpretii wild on Tenerife

They metamorphosed spectacularly into some of the most magnificent and unusual plants in cultivation, which show evolution in isolation at its finest. Like the Galapagos finches - a different beak on every island to adapt to specific conditions - which helped inspire Darwin’s theory of evolution, these Macaronesian [Canary Islands and Madeira] plants have evolved to fill highly specialised niches. 

Each island has its own species. Some, like E. pininana (12ft blue spires familiar sight in gardens along the Atlantic fringes of the British Isles), come from the laurisilva - the cloud forest of exotic trees distantly related to our culinary bay tree. Others bask in the arid heat of the islands' volcanic slopes - the most spectacular of which, E. wildprettii, I have three precious little plants.

...and the perfect place for them.  

A problem corner, near a cypress by the front of the house - sun baked with dry impoverished soil, full of gravel from the nearby path. 

A perfect replica of those parched volcanic slopes? We’ll find out...

Vegetable delights

We had some rather "top end" visitors to the garden the other day. 

The owner of one of the local perfume houses (for which Grasse is world-famous); an immaculately dressed lady, all dark glasses and pearls; came for a look around the garden. I was weeding the new potager, which five months ago was a bare terrace; she had a long look up and down the rows of tomatoes, chard, the box balls, sculpture and oblongs of calade and pronounced it...

"Sophisticated" 

I could’ve kissed her.

It's amazing what a difference a few months can make: February, April, June and July

Waters of Life

Just as boilers have a habit of giving up the ghost on the first cold weekend of autumn, so the irrigation system chose mid-June, The Most Critical Point of The Gardening Calendar, to deprive us of water. Hundreds of newly planted flowers, vegetables and herbs cowered under the hard bright blue dome of sky and unrelenting sun.

The only sensible thing to do is to wait till the cool of evening and get out there with hoses and cans. It’s a real discipline, getting the right amount of water to the plants at the right time. No good wetting the leaves at midday with a high pressure hose. A minute’s gentle trickle of water at the roots in the evening is worth half an hour’s sprinkling in the sunshine.

And it’s a great way to get to know the garden. Normally you’re so busy “doing”, there is no time, as W. H. Davies said, to stand and stare. Great ideas come from peaceful rumination and gentle care.

Sometimes though, it’s difficult to keep looking at the plants. The sun sets and the mountains sink one by one into inky shadows, jet trails catch the last coppery rays of light; - then fireflies come out and remind you - you’ve not had dinner yet.

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad day light,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

rom Songs Of Joy and Others (1911)   

Weeding and Seeding

A few weeks ago I gaily sowed my Agastache (hummingbird mints), red plantains and Stipa tenuissima (which the French rather poetically call cheveux d’ange - Angel’s Hair. In English it’s the rather terse Feather Grass) etc;  watered well, stood back, and waited.  

I then watched aghast as an increasingly dementedly vigorous field of fat hen and wild oats sprang up instead.

Everything I’ve put in as a growing plant has taken - even the tiny transplants of sea hollies (which insist on flowering despite my best efforts to discourage them). But the direct seeding plan has been what politicians would call ‘a learning curve’.  One definite lesson has been the difference between gardening here and the city gardens I’ve become accustomed to over the past few years - the phenomenal seed bank that can build up in rural gardens.

All I can do is groan, wait for a sunny, windy day and reach for the hoe, and admit defeat in my direct seeding experiment.  Hoeing away on a warm day with stupendous views isn’t all bad. I’m going to re-sow my chosen plants in modules in the shelter of the cold frames and hope to plant out in the autumn once it cools down and the rains return. 

Rape in the Garden..

In the midst of the lush fullness of early summer something sinister lurks. In dark corners, innocent green leaves and bright flowers give way to an altogether more malevolent breed of plants.

In the woodland, perched above the high cliffs where jackdaws circle cawing their own clattering nonsense, a stange and rather remarkable plant has burst through the leaf litter with breathtaking speed. Three weeks ago there wasn’t a trace of it and now, metre-high spikes of deep purple flowers.

It is an orchid, Limodorum abortivum, which spends up to ten years growing quietly underground, parasitising the fungi of the woodland floor before deciding it’s time for a bit of sex. It doesn’t bother with mundane things like leaves or branches, just roots to feast and flowers to fornicate. If I get reincarnated as a plant I hope it’s this one!

Now seems to be the moment for such charlatans plants to shine. A broomrape (Orobanche) has appeared in the cold frames, much to everyone’s amazement. It’s no-where near as pretty as the orchid - more of a cross between asparagus and a yellow deadnettle - but interesting nonetheless. 

Broomrapes are a large group of parasitic plants - often mere curiosities to gardeners in Eurasia, but serious pests to farmers elsewhere in the world. There are hundreds of different kinds adapted to grow on everything from ivy to yarrow to potatoes.

And finally... one I didn’t just 'find'. Back in the winter M said to me “Here’s some mistletoe, think you can grow it?”  To which I said “errrm”.

We let the berries ripen on the cut sprigs until early March, then I smeared the berries on branches of an olive tree (better not tell The Olive Man) and this is the result:

PS apologies for the lack of pictures on this entry. Will post more when I get a replacement memory card for the one that has just died...

Weeds...

The first task for the new Prairie Garden was to deal with weeds. And what weeds they were. Are. 

Part of the terrace was covered in imported soil in which I’d earlier noted a few weeds. When the time came to get cracking, I realised saying “a few weeds” was a bit like saying “My neighbours aren’t too great” and living in a trailer park with Freddy Kruger, Fred West and Anders Brevik....

The hearty mixture included plenty of  bindweed, half a dozen different thistles, and kikuyu. Utter bêtes noires of the plant world...

All that careful tugging, digging, lugging and slicing gave me time to think.  On day three it struck me... some of them are actually quite beautiful. Bindweed is but a hardy white Morning Glory.  Thistles, especially Onopordums, are regularly used by fashionable garden designers: - how farmers must scoff at those ruiners of pastures standing proud in artificial meadows at the Chelsea Flower Show.

But it goes to show, look closely and you might just find beauty in unexpected places. I got my macro lenses out and had a look:

The fabulously-named white ramping fumitory, Fumaria capreolata

Above and right: yellow hawkweed, Hierachium pratense

A wild mignonette, Reseda spp

Lawn daisy - Bellis perennis

Erigeron karvinskianus - "wall daisies" 

Scarlet pimpernell being well, not very scarlet...