An Introduction to My Garden

When we arrived on our field I had not anticipated that a decade on, the garden would still really be rather more field than garden. 

Part of this is deliberate - a large swathe of the 'grass' only gets cut once a year allowing the wildflowers a chance to flower and set seed.

 


This benefits the whole local ecosystem and is intended to increase, or at least stop the decline, in biodiversity. That's the theory, anyway. The moles certainly seem happy!

We have fruit trees, apples, pears, cherries, plums and figs which are finally starting to produce, although we have also lost a fig and a plum (to voles, would you believe?), the walnut will not fruit in my life time and I still have a space for a quince or two. 

The potager largely feeds us, although wildlife often still comes first; the presence of swallowtail butterfly caterpillars on the Florence fennel meaning I'll have to wait until they have finished eating before I can have what's left! 

My gardening passion, as far as the vegetable plot is concerned, is for those warm weather plants that needed a greenhouse back in the UK. I still get an intense swell of pride at a plot full of aubergines and peppers, or the chance to pick a handful of tomatoes and eat them still warm from the vine at lunchtime. But pride of place goes to chilli peppers, an essential ingredient in the kitchen and something that I cannot find in the local shops. French food may be a culinary benchmark, but they've missed a trick with chillies. Only our neighbours in the Basque country with their Piment d'Espelette really get it.

We are fortunate to live in a heavily forested area which brings its own challenges; roe deer eat the fresh growth, favouring roses and raspberries, boar and badgers grub up the grass and many of my main weeds are in fact trees. A fine example of the woody nature of the plot is the 'hedge' that runs down one side of the garden. 

In fact, it is simply our boundary where we stopped cutting the grass. Next door is an abandoned building plot where the scrub has taken over and trees are starting to establish themselves. It is a rough, unkempt area heaving with wildlife!











In practical terms, the garden is on a south facing slope and the soil is very, very poor clay. When still grazed, the topsoil layer was little more than four or five centimetres deep and the majority of that was scraped off during the building of our house. There are still patches where very little has managed to establish itself: solid clay with boulders is too much even for the weeds. 

We are slowly improving the soil and one of the advantages of the business is a constant supply of weeds for the compost heap and grass clippings which I use to mulch all the trees and hedges. 


Our temperature range is broadly -15 to 40 degrees, although even in the ten years we've been here our average has been moving steadily warmer. We get snow, but it rarely hangs around long although you only have to drive 4km up the road out of the valley to find a much colder climate. We get a lot of rain, but it tends to be concentrated in short ferocious bursts during the summer, although the previous winter was, according to the Maire the wettest one for forty years. It finally stopped raining in June last summer and didn't really start again until February this year. Extraordinary and very worrying.