how green is my garden...

Well our garden, of course, rather than mine. But, in the absence of paid work, I have been lavishing more attention on it than ever and feel a little proprietorial. The reward is intense pleasure…

April and May are usually the best gardening months here, before the heat and drought of the Grenoble summer. The foliage and contrasting colours are a joy: crimson photinia next to soft grey phlomis; the fresh, pale-green branches of dogwood beaming from either end of the flower bed; glossy hosta gleaming after rain; an exotic geranium with chocolate-brown leaves and pink flowers now well established after two years in place...

The shade bed on the north side of the house is bursting with lily of the valley, forget-me-not, geum, wood anemone, the exquisite new leaves of epimedium, ferns, peony and late daffodils...

This early in the season none of the trees are displaying the symptoms of the various maladies that will show up later in the year. The rowan is in full flower; the lime looks as though it might forgive us for the savage pruning we gave it in March, capitulating to the French way and seeking to impose a desired growth habit – which meant lopping off the central spire to force sideways, shade-producing growth in a species that was never really designed for such an adventure. Ouch, I still feel bad about that.

This week may be the last for the wildflower islands that I’ve enjoyed “sculpting” in the lawn. They are going to seed and beginning to look eccentric, rather than artistic. In the light of ongoing uncertainty about The Future I’m not investing in plants in the usual way – just doing a few containers.

But there’s still plenty of work: weed control, in particular managing the rampageous honeysuckle that now threatens to choke many of the hedge plants, is full on. 

There’s a subtle balance between that very English notion of cultivated wildness – and unadulterated jungle. I love the result: the spindles in the hedge draping themselves across their neighbours; self-seeded pansies thrusting through the gravel around the house; the hedge and honeysuckle pushing out from our property boundary, risking their lives to the blade of municipal pruning. But it’s in sharp contrast to our neighbours who recently chain-sawed down the edge of the hedge adjoining our gardens because they didn’t like it growing through the wire boundary. Alas, that was exactly what we liked! So we have lost privacy built up over ten years of hedge growth on our shared border.

Today I decided to tackle the central flower bed, where the mahonia is now monumental, but without huge interest. I was about to launch into a major curtailment of its bulk when I found myself eye to eye with a nesting blackbird. Yikes. We’d been observing its mate (?) flying to and fro over a period of several weeks but hadn’t seen them recently. Having googled and found the incubation period is only 2 weeks, we had assumed the nest had been abandoned. Not so. So the mahonia lives another day.