Heroes Not Zombies

When we bought our house here in the Charente Maritime about four years ago the garden had been pretty much neglected for a long, long time. The house had previously been someone’s holiday house and, as if often the case, when you come on your holiday you don’t want to spend the time doing house and garden maintenance.

One result of that is that pretty much everything growing in the garden had arrived here by itself.

We spend a lot of time in the garden and have reclaimed the impenetrable area we call our forest (honestly, it’s way too small to be a forest but it has the feel of one)

I love the discoveries we make. We’ve found many plants and trees which have been thriving here for years, but it’s still an actively serendipitous garden. New plants appear every year. Here are a couple of the more recent ones…

This is Russian Sage (thank goodness for smartphone abilities to recognise plants), which has popped up in a gravel area.

And this Pokeweed, a plant I know from homeopathy, but which I’d never seen in real life until it started growing in front of the wall. It grows really tall and has spectacular leaves, flowers, stems and berries!