Wild flowers

"We visited the Haute Marne before deciding on the Aube for our house hunting.  We stayed in a little village near Chaumont, and kept driving past wild flowers wherever we went…  I fell in love.  It was how I imagine England would have been in the fifties, before agrichemical giants set about rearranging the face of the countryside!

“I’ve never seen (wild) orchids before, but now I’m nearly blasé about them.  And talk about cowslips!  We even saw some oxlips.  The verbascums are enormous, and seeing the giant yellow gentians or purple pasque flowers all along a roadside was amazing.”

I wrote the above, intending to post it when I found some photos, and then forgot.  It must be four or more years old, and coming across it unexpectedly has saddened me: it’s no longer true…

All the communes have started to “tidy” up their verges, and mow the grass really close before the wild flowers have had chance to set seed.  The places where I knew I could reliably find lizard or bee or pyramid orchids, or a choice of four or five smaller orchids, now have neat, tidy, boring and orchid-free grass, with occasional flashes of colour as if to emphasise how much we have lost.

I keep hoping the financial “crisis” will extend to saving some money on mowing the countryside, but it hasn’t yet!

[And don't get me started on "light pollution" from the street lighting...]