Cross-Channel dash

We did a flying visit to the house in early October - it was nearly ten years since we bought the place, and we're still driving to garden.  The only real difference is that now we're doing it with two gardens, in two countries, not just going abroad to do so!

It had clearly been very wet (again) in our absence, but the neighbours told us that the vendange had been wonderful; a late warm, dry, spell had really ripened and sweetened the grapes, and the weather for the harvest was lovely until the last day.  We believe them, but the plant growth and sogginess of the ground says that an awful lot more rain had fallen since our last trip.

I'm not sure if that's why so many spiders were in the house; several people have said the wet is driving the spiders indoors, but we tend to have "indoor" spiders anyway.  I do know that we had an extraordinary number of corpses in the sink...  With one live spider sitting there; I'm guessing it wasn't a freak occurrence that killed them all, but cannibalism?  Either way, the remaining inhabitant was evicted pretty promptly!

Photos??

I found these photos saved as a draft post - not quite sure why, or even if I ever posted them...

But seeing them here reminded me that we no longer [mostly] have animals just coming into the house!

The froglet and shrew both came in when we were between phases of renovation work, and both got evicted to somewhere where they (hopefully) wouldn't come back into the house.

Not that I have a problem about (nice) creatures paying the occasional visit, but they can end up dying as they forget how to get out/can't get out because they entered whilst a door or window was open.

Sadly, it's not been the end of critter ingress [although it's better now we've blocked up various of the larger holes upstairs ("larch-lap" wall & mdf over the hole in a window)]; I went to light the fire last time we were at the house [all the rain made it so damp; most people had theirs going, too], and there was a dead bat in there.

He must have dropped down the chimney (?) and couldn't get out.  I was really sad and felt immensely guilty, but there was nothing I could do.  I didn't even want to take a photo of him.

I also found a dead shrew, but that was outside in the potager, so he either died or natural causes or was owl prey & got dropped?  I didn't feel guilt over him.

I'd just rather all the animals stayed alive and outside!

Nasty-looking fungus...

We went into the large cellar to find the painting stuff [for "Brookside"; it needs totally re-decorating, preferably before we move in], and the pallet the boxes were on was infested with a horrible-looking fungus.

We took everything out of the cellar that had been on the pallet [upstairs I treated the floor with Cuprinol 5-Star, so I'm hopeful that it will all be OK; none of the plastic boxes seemed to have any fungus on them].

We moved the pallet to the garden and are leaving it there till we decide what to do [it looks just like images of dry rot fungus, so I wanted it out of the cellar].

The cellar is completely stone, and the floor above it is concrete and tile, so I'm hopeful it will just be a local infection, and won't spread to the rest of the house.

It's been so wet this summer, it's amazing that all the pallets down there aren't the same, and that we have no other instances about the place.

It's a definite 'fingers crossed' event...

We have the cellar as well-ventilated as possible, but with the ground like a giant puddle so much of the time, there's only so much we can do.

Spraying bindweed

I hate to do it, but (especially given how warm & wet this year has been) we've no realistic chance of defeating it [and so getting on with planting].

We're trying some new stuff, that's highly recommended, so keeping our fingers crossed it's more effective than Round-Up has been.

So far, it seems promising...

Iris Garden

Last year we got around to creating the "iris garden" in front of the meadow-facing kitchen window...

The ground is pretty crappy, but that seems to be what irises like, so a winner all round!

We'd eradicated (almost all) the bindweed...

And I'm quite happy spot-weeding just a bit of bindweed.

We bought the rhizome-type irises [the sort that like to be baked in summer]...

And planted them up.

We interspersed with the bulb irises, but late frosts after a really mild winter killed off almost all the of the buds, just as they were about to flower.

This year, they'd really grown, and I think all of them flowered.

I love some of the flowers [all those shown]...

But am not sure about the muddier-coloured ones...

If I'm not any happier next year, I will move them and replace with some 'prettier' colours.

Like this one, for instance!

Cérémonie du Souvenir

In the early hours of 13 July 1944, Lancaster LM388 from 166 Squadron based at RAF Kirmington was hit over Ruvigny near Troyes on the Revigny-sur-Ornain railway bombing raids in northern France.  The aircraft sustained damage too great to make it back to England and, with its engines on fire, crashed into a steep-sided valley in (what is now) the Bois de Vitry in the Aube department to the south of the Champagne-Ardennes region of France, sadly only yards away from a plateau.

Three gentlemen from Eguilly-sous-Bois heard the plane in trouble, and a small boy in Vitry-le-Croisé saw the sky lit up by the flames from the engines as it skimmed the trees, but no-one saw the crash.  Six unexploded bombs carried by the bomber were safely exploded by bomb-disposal crews in 1945.

Five crew members escaped and, with the assistance of villagers in Eguilly, Vitry, the Maquis de Mussy-Grancey, and Résistance in the area, made their way back to Blighty.

Two crew members were lost in the crash; one must have died immediately on impact, the other bled to death, trapped in the wreckage.  Hunters found their remains several days later, and on the 17th, a horse-drawn bier brought them to Vitry, under guard of the Maquis, together with four machine guns; the men and guns taken to the archive room of the Mairie.

This late in the war, the occupying forces were aware that the Allies would soon be upon them, and were fighting a vicious rearguard action; word of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane had spread, emphasising that instead of giving up, German forces were fighting tooth and nail to maintain their present position, and more than any time before would punish most harshly those found to be members of the Maquis, Résistance, or harbouring fugitives.

The German army was using the (what is now the D4) road through the village of Vitry for its major troop movements in the area.  The road winds around the churchyard of the village.

On 18 July, luck seemed to be on the side of the angels, and the German forces stayed in Bar-sur-Seine and Bar-sur-Aube (at either end of the D4); the thoughts of the reprisals must have turned hearts cold, being just over a month since Oradour paid the ultimate price.

That day, under those perils, the Maquis organised funerals for the downed airmen from the makeshift chapel in the Mairie, with the Résistance guarding all access roads to the village, attended by all the able-bodied people from all the communes around (more than two thousand people came, most on foot; far more than the church could hold), and in the presence of two of their surviving comrades the fallen were laid to rest in the churchyard of the 12th Century Templar church in Vitry-le-Croisé...

...and for Flight Sergeant R F Scott and Sergeant E Ashton there is a little part of France that will be forever England.

Sgt Ashton, and survivor Mike Walsh

-------------------------------------------

On 13 July 2014, the village of Vitry-le-Croisé organised a 70th anniversary memorial service in honour of the two Englishmen who would never return home, and in thanks of Allied efforts to free their country; even seventy years later, the gratitude of the villagers was palpable, and touching.

Wreckage from Lancaster LM388, 166 Squ

We have recently had the moving Great War Centenary commemorations in England, and I can appreciate on a cerebral level the loss of 888,246 soldiers' lives during that conflict.  But seeing a propeller from a crashed plane, hearing the Last Post several times at the war memorial in front of the Mairie, again at the War Graves and the memorial to the French dead in the churchyard, and seeing an elderly French gentleman dabbing at his eye has touched me to my core, and I know I wasn't the only person who 'got something in their eye' during the service.

Pompiers providing an honour guard

As pointed out during the D-Day 70th anniversary events, this is probably the last decade-commemoration where a significant number of servicemen and women will still be alive/able-bodied enough to attend services.  An end of an era; I have since contacted a gentleman who maintains records of aircrews, and he told me that there are no longer any survivors of LM388.

Flags dipped for the Last Post for airmen Ashton and Scott

The older villagers had lived their lives under years of occupation [the crash happened day 1481 of the occupation of France], in an area that was strongly Résistant, had had executions nearby of those caught helping foreign airmen, and they were still thanking us for the English efforts.

The organiser and David

The organiser of the ceremony apologised to us for not getting us to lay the flowers [we hadn't known about the service in advance; the mayor of Vitry-le-Croisé (who David knows) had seen us as he was driving past our holiday home which is fairly nearby, and stopped in to invite us to proceedings]; that would have felt so awkward - we had done nothing, other than being English - it was so much more fitting that veterans laid the tributes.  It was an honour to be invited, and I'm still getting a pricking at the back of my throat thinking about the effort that had gone into the day.

Jean-Luc; his grandfather sheltered a crash survivor

Being France, it seemed quite official, but the service was quiet, dignified, typically "French", deeply sincere, and very moving.  And also being France, there were apéritifs afterwards!  I chatted to, among others: a boy who had seen the plane in flames when he was five, someone who had seen the deceased crewmen in the plane when he was ten and a gentleman who had attended the funeral as a twelve-year-old.  Another friend who lives in the village told us his grandfather was one of those villagers who took in an escapee from the crash before he started his journey back to England.

100-youngest Résistance member and chief of Maquis de Mussy-Grancey

I think the greatest honour was meeting the man who had been the leader of the Maquis de Mussy-Grancey at the time - I would love to say we chatted, but I found his accent impenetrable [I do, sadly, with some of the older men in the area] and he was stone deaf, even with his hearing aid - and a gentleman who was one of the 100-youngest Résistance fighters [and had a medal to prove it].  They risked so much and, for me at least, reminded me that we are close neighbours and not just the [usually] joking "frogs" and "ros-bifs" of tabloid headlines.

At the crash site: flag-bearer and boys with fuselage wreckage

A day of dignified remembrance: a sombre and touching ceremony, bitter-sweet time for apéros and reminiscences, a (three to four mile) walk to the crash site where all present threw flowers into the crater (children playing and finding fuselage fragments, a veteran with bowed head holding a regimental flag, and then all heads bowed and another Last Post before we 'laid' the flowers summed up the feeling of the day; sombre/sad and glad-to-be-alive in equal measures), and an abiding feeling of 'warm fuzzies; I'm so glad our visit coincided with that weekend, and that Bernard saw our house opened up on his travels.

I feel truly blessed.

They giveth, and they taketh away

Before/during:

Digging up the road surface, in order to lay a new one...

Shiny new road, but...  No trees!

The commune has chopped down all the trees in the churchyard

We were hoping they would pollard them soon, but now the garden feels very naked; we hadn't realise quite how much we relied on the church to proved our 'backdrop'.

David has spoken with Bernard, and I understand that they are planning on planting new trees and had to cut the existing ones down as they were endangering the wall - I really hope they do.

Weird seeing more of the village, but I'm sure we'll get used to it very quickly, and it would be a crying shame if the lovely walls came down after all the work/money the commune invested in making everything safe - it's a Templar church, so has been around much longer than the trees.

Weather I haven't already posted about...

Over the last couple of years, we've had a lot of windy, rainy weather in France [which for various reasons I never got around to blogging about], and I found some photos when I was sorting through Picasa, so in no particular order:

Wind rips out trees in Vendeuvre:

We had some fantastic winds, and the chateau in Vendeuvre-sur-Seine seemed particularly targeted - a lot of trees were broken off 5-10' above ground [even a road sign was bent by a gust].

They chopped all the trees off at a similar height - I'm guessing so no more became casualties of future storms...

Hopefully, they are the sort of tree that pollards!

Huge-hail storm:

We had an immense hail storm one night - it woke me up through the industrial-strength ear plugs, and lasted what seemed like ages!

We we're leaving to come back to the UK about 2-3 hours later, and there was still a hail-drift to the side of the road.

Sadly, the light was so poor that I couldn't show how big the individual hailstones were.

Just glad I didn't have an open chimney [like in Brixton, before I had all the chimney caps put on], and have to rush round with a dustpan and brush collecting sooty debris before it stained the floor...

Done that a few times, and how I love chimney caps!

Water being drained from the lakes/Canal de la Restitution:

[Except I don't think it's called that...?]

The Seine flooded [and this close to the source, that's pretty impressive], and at Troyes filled lorry cabs the water was so high - so you can guess how much water fell out of the sky!

Last time we went to France [usually a time of brown verges, and very little growth] the grass had grown chest high in six weeks, and the garden looked fantastic, but it's all an indication of sustained/prolonged rainfall over the whole winter.

The (overflow-ditch-that-is-probably-NOT) the Canal de la Restitution [but I'm going to call it that till I can remember what it is called], has steadily dropped in level; I bet the people downstream on the Seine were glad that as much water as could be emptied into the lakes was funnelled away from the river.

They seem to be raising the banks, too?

Speaking of flooding...:

Villy-en-Trodes, before:

Villy-en-Trodes, after:

Can't wait to see what the weather's been doing in our absence this time.

Changes at our place (with some photos)

Continuing our trench:

Gosh, it's nearly two years since I posted about Vincent's trench, and it seems to have worked wonderfully; the potager is not weed free, but we definitely don't seem to be having any root incursion,and that was the main thing!

Bindweed remains a problem, but it's no longer 'seeping' in from the field, and I think I've virtually eradicated the couch grass [and that one I can manage - wait for damp ground, dig gently, and it pulls out nicely].  We are going to try spot spraying with a different herbicide [recommended by the very helpful chap who told us about the root killer which worked fabulously on the sycamore stump], but that's a post for another day [want to see if it works, first!]...

I don't know why I didn't get him to continue digging in the membrane to the fence we share with Philippe, but it pretty quickly became apparent that I should have done.

Oh, well, finally got around to asking him to come back, and it's "sorted" now.

AND, he brought and spread for us a load of topsoil [the potager had sunk quite a lot].

I'm very keen to start planting things, but also know that if we don't get the space bindweed-free before we start we've set ourselves up for years of 'pain'; I've waited this long, I can wait a bit longer!

Shredder:

We ordered a shredder, that arrived disassembled into small enough bits that we could get it into the car [so didn't have to hire a van].

It assembled pretty easily - a bit of pushing & shoving and (if I remember correctly) only a bit of 'percussive adjustment' from a 'universal spanner' [I always use a wood block to protect everything I'm 'drifting' from the head of the hammer, so it's not as brutal as it sounds!], and it was there.

We started on the compost "mountain" that had shrunk somewhat, but was a) still huge, and b) nowhere near becoming compost.

We were watering the shreddings really well into the trench left behind after M. Milesi had built his wall - we wanted to not have a huge gap, and are hoping to plant some red elder/smokebush/red twisted hazel when we can get around to it.

We just need nature to work its magic, now.

Coloured garden areas:

Not sure why I've put this here, as I haven't got any photos...  But I am attempting to have (some) themed areas near the driveway.

After my surgery last year [a BIG sorry to David], I managed to accumulate 69 pots to take to France [I managed to load all of them with only one hand, so I did what little I could], and 71 plants [I think I'd managed to sneak a couple of transplants into one pot?], which my wonderful assistant in his (temporary) role of head gardener planted.

It was 25°C at 10pm, so we probably got it badly wrong with when to take plants to a hot, continental, climate...

The aim is to have a bunch of pink coloured plants all near each other, then merging into purple/blue planting, which is next to "hot" colours.

Obviously, there will be things popping up [particularly yellow daisy-type flowers] that I may need to move...

And despite what I have read/been told, don't chop down Oriental Poppies; I had a fabulous clump of "Allegro", which I managed to reduce to about four sickly sprouts...  I thought I'd nothing to lose by transplanting them to where I wanted them (most of them looked on the way out), so I think I have a couple of tiny shoots in the "hot" area, and one I missed in the "pink" zone.

On the upside: we bought a small pump with a tube that drops down into our rainwater tank, and that works brilliantly - so much so that we managed to water in all the plants and soak most of the compost/shreddings before it ran out.  Another long-term aim is to sort out the leak in the tank, and create a drain nearer the top for when it will overfill.

Stealing the drive:

Well, not stealing, more 're-allocating'...

The old (pale brown) bark is where the drive used to finish...

But because of the piles of sand and gravel, we haven't used that space for several years (and don't miss it), so it made sense [to me, at any rate!], to properly incorporate it into the garden...

We've been accumulating tufa every time we find some, and nearly have enough to give the drive a defined edge...

Well, at least we've started, and it looks a lot tidier!

Orchids in the meadow:

We know we probably shouldn't...  [Move orchid plants, that is.]

But since the communes have all taken to mowing down the verges regularly through the summer...

We've seen a tiny fraction of the number of plants/varieties in the countryside...  [They're going to be eradicated in the wild if that continues; like England.]

And Jean-Luc mows ours off when he cuts the hay...

So we transplanted as many orchids as we could find to the edges J-L can't get at...

And we've only had a couple of plants looking a bit sickly, but we've got another 12-15 flowering away.

We dug as huge a clump of soil out as we could and, and used the mycorrhiza powder in the holes.

Now we're just hoping they will set seed and we can establish a colony.

David one day [he'd strimmed that part down to the ground about eight weeks earlier; to the left of the picture is the bit he hadn't touched - spot the difference?].

One day later: he'd cut pathways so we can get to the plants we're trying to cosset [some fruit trees, the above orchids and our nettle colony (not mad; we haven't seen any of either variety of swallowtail, or the marbled white,  since we cleared behind the house, and I want to encourage whatever butterflies had laid their eggs on them to come back) - OK, we're not actively cossetting the nettles, but I want them to establish away from where the hay-cutting will chop them down].

Phew, that's it for me [for now!].