Life in a Brittany Garden

It just won’t stop raining for more than five minutes to let the ground dry out and warm up. I am getting pissed off. If I walk on the grass or on the soil it turns immediately into slippery, gloopy mud. And it’s not very warm – neither the soil nor the temperature.  And it…

The rather extreme (for here!) weather these past few days has shown me a couple things that have made me go ‘Wow!’ Putting aside the strange phenomenon of full-on sunshine in Central Brittany for six consecutive days. The first, admittedly banal, occurrence was that the sheets I put on the line to dry froze like…

Well…. Lots of shopping for seeds, bulbs, onion sets and seed potatoes! The seed shopping I suppose could have been done from France, as it’s almost all online, but I like the ritual of it in London – mainly because it reminds me that I’ll be going back to sow them all. That said, looking…

After a few days of the kind of weather that, if it persists, makes winter here dreary. A few images taken during the dreariness that show the beauty that is still there if I open my eyes to it! Huelgoat forest. The Mare aux Sangliers after the rain… Late December.Lichens from a fallen branch of…

My newly arrived neighbours to this remote little muddy field in Brittany are Scottish! There are five of them, all unrelated, all female – even though they’re all called Angus! Six months old and hail from Aberdeen (apparently) though they didn’t confirm that when I met them earlier. The cat doesn’t like them.

The rain just doesn’t seem to have stopped. I’m sure it must have at some point these last days, but I was either asleep or I somehow didn’t notice. Actually, it did for about 30 minutes this morning – and probably did for some of yesterday, so I’m being overly dramatic. I’m listening to it…

I have to scrabble around and grab hold of the good at this time of year. Outwardly everything is rotting, withdrawing, collapsing and dying around me. It’s  cold. It’s damp. I can’t walk on the grass without turning it into a slippery mud trail – but I have to walk on the grass and wheel my…

I’ve just started lifting the Oca in a serious way – rather than just scratching around the plants to see what’s there.  It’s been so damp and chilly the leaves are starting to drop and rot even under the netting and, though I’d rather wait longer, I can’t. Major vole depredations as usual. But I…

How I have waited for this photo – even though it’s not very good! After the miserable weather, and especially after this cold spell, I was thrilled to see two Clouded Yellows in the garden. They really are the last men standing. Even the reliable Speckled Woods have gone now and I haven’t seen a…

After a fair amount of time spent moping or doing very little I’ve finally spent a day hacking back the dead stems, scratching out the moss and prising out the couch grass ‘onions’. It’s  satisfying to see some semblance of order returning to parts of the most overgrown places – and more importantly, the re-opening…