April visit 3

Garden

The garden (if you looked past the weeds - & that took some doing!) was starting to look lovely; there were clumps of about 10 different narcissi, and both kinds of ipheion, and the damson (soon, hopefully, to be removed by M. Lorin & his chainsaw) and mirabelle were covered in white blossom. Very vernal! For every silver lining (it sometimes feels) there has to be a cloud: the “indelible” pen I bought (yes, it was a proper one for writing on labels) turns out to be a joke indelible pen – the only labels that hadn’t washed/faded clean were the few bulbs that I knew the names of anyway! That will teach me to try to be organized! We ran out of time when we were planting the bulbs, so I never managed to draw a little plan of what had gone where, safe in the knowledge that the really big strong yellow labels wouldn’t blow away… They didn’t, but they might as well have done. Oh well, next year I will have to take with me some pictures of the types of bulbs I planted & map them out then.

I was trying to work out the last time I had weeded properly – it must have been in the summer some time, and possibly as early as June, so no wonder the weeds had gone mad! At least this year I won’t be digging out for the patio (still have to lay it, but that will be comparatively easy), nor will I have to move the soil mountain (that’s just a distant memory), so I can focus on hoeing and hand weeding. If I don’t plant any seeds, I can just hoe… but how likely is that?!

We saw a nuthatch checking out the blasted tree (another mirabelle, I think) by the snail pits – we think it was inspecting the hole for a nesting site. But that wasn’t our most exciting bird sighting: we were in Troyes, turning into a retail park to look at fireplaces, when we were treated to a bird’s eye view of a bird of prey trying to catch lunch. We think it was a sparrowhawk and a wagtail; they were so close we could see really clearly the markings on the feathers. We were so startled that we didn’t turn round in time to see whether the little bird got away (I’m always on the side of the underdog!)…