Thoughts turn to the garden

Our Virginia creeper...as I left it in late October.

When I left France at the end of October I had plans to organise a garden book. It was to hold photos and drawings of various parts of the garden , with my plans for how each area would be developed.

I was inspired to undertake this project ( as well as the actual proposed garden developments to be documented in the book) whilst attending a gardening course held at La Petite Pepiniere in Caunes just before I headed back to the UK for the winter.

La Petite Pepiniere is a magical specialist garden/nursery  owned by Gill Pound in Caunes.)

( Gill's web site is http://www.lapetitepepiniere.com/ ) and shows what a fabulous place it is.

Gill, during one of our classroom sessions.

The course, was a 2 day event, run by Gill, and concentrated on gardening in a Mediterranean climate.

Much of the course was spent walking around the garden at la Petite Pepiniere, with Gill, showing us examples of the successful planting she has undertaken in her Caunes garden.

I learned so much. I learned that the less than 3% of the world’s surface which can be categorised as having a Mediterranean climate ( areas surrounding the med ...surprise surprise, California, Chile, S Africa and SW Australia) produce 16% of the world’s plants.

Our bit of the world does suffer from extremes though....heat, drought, wild winds, cold winters, snow, hail, frost and difficult soils. It seems miraculous that anything grows and survives at all. One of the things I learned from Gill was about how plants have  evolved and adapted to their environment......and as the climate has only been like it is now for 3 million years, many plants are still evolving . So...things in the garden are basically unpredictable.

Our garden in Caunes is beautiful.....but difficult.

The pine forest behind the big oak....a cypress, and some prickly pears hiding behind the ivy and virginia creeper.

We have terracing, virtual rock, rather than soil in some parts, evergreens, conifers, a few broadleaf plants and trees, bulbs, ( hundreds of wild irises) orchids, native garrigue shrubs, vines, and my annual attempts at vegetables in the potager.

beyond the potager.....the start of a playground area....see-saw and sand pit planned for next year....the grandchildren want a slide and a climbing frame as well......mmmm, we'll have to see.

We have almond trees, a wide variety of oak trees, green fig trees, a gorgeous purple fig tree, olive trees of various ages and sizes and a couple of small apple trees which fruited for the first time last summer and newly planted cherry trees which have yet to crop.

We have enormous succulents, aloe veras  to die for, a rather pathetic looking palm that replaced the huge 25 year old one that was killed off by the 2 weeks of snow and freezing temperatures in the winter of 2011, rose bushes, lavender and large rosemary hedges throughout the garden.

Some of the succulents

When we first arrived in Caunes, we asked Gill to come up to the house and walk around the garden with us, telling us what we had, and advising us on what we should do with it all.

Her advice was to live with it, watch it, see what happened with each season and gradually develop sections at a time, as we worked out how the land surrounding our new home could work best for us.

We determined that some of the huge fir trees surrounding the pool should be removed.

 Doing so enabled other plants to grow in their place, removed the huge shade area from the pool, and gave us fabulous views over the village.

We kept many of the cypress trees as well as the most beautiful of the firs...giving some architectural structure to the pool surround.

We cut back and then removed the prickly pears that bordered pathways, enabling us...and visiting grandchildren to walk through the garden without being impaled.

We removed some of the wild iris bulbs....they bloom when we are not in Caunes, and leave untidy browning foliage for the rest of the year....this is great in the parts of the garden we have left “wild”...but in front of the house, we replaced them with some native salvias which bloom all summer and provide a gorgeous backdrop to sitting on the terrace, sipping the odd glass of wine.

My garden book project has not even been started yet....just as my planned blog about the wonderful gardening course run by Gill has not yet emerged. My last blog....a month ago, was mainly about my inability to get things done, and things don’t seem to have improved. So I thought I would make a start and include a little about Gill and her beautiful garden, her brilliant gardening courses, and get my mind working on thinking about the garden in Caunes.

It is good to think that already the days are getting longer.....and spring isn't too far away. Although we wont be going back to Caunes for our next 6 month stay until May, we are popping over to do some pruning during the first couple of weeks in March......not long now.

Anyway....for Christmas, I received an excellent gift from Mark....no, not some amazing piece of jewellery, but a Bosch garden shredder. Mulching will begin as a major operation, when I get back to Caunes and start shredding all my prunings.