We moved to this house in a small hamlet in the Charente Maritime five years ago. It’s a traditional white stone Charentaise farmhouse with wooden shutters and a pretty large garden. In fact, the amount of ground which comes with a rural property in France is a real eye opener.
The house was built in the 1880s, and has gone through phases of family home for the farmer, to a renovation project of an English woman, to a second home, then on to us.
Most of the garden is a grassy slope. I say “grassy” because there is grass in there amongst an astonishingly diverse green ground cover. I love to stumble across little flowers on the slope, from orchids to wild sage, to Selfheal and clover. We’ve created a herb garden in one of the beds near the house, and we’ve cleared (with professional help) a previously impenetrable wooded area which stretches to the edge of the farmers field where he plants something different every year, including wheat and sunflowers.
I love the wooded area. It’s like having a tiny forest, and I’ve created a couple of rough paths to encourage wandering through it.
We’ve created a potager out of half a dozen raised beds with iron arches over which we grow butternut squash, cucumbers and courgettes and experiment with different varieties of tomatoes, peppers and aubergines each year.
But almost all the garden has grown itself really. I don’t know if anyone actually planted any of the trees, and I’ve encountered more wild flowers I’ve never seen before than I’ve ever done.
When I across a flower where nobody planted it I always feel it’s a gift…..a gift from the garden gods, which, I suspect usually appear as a surprising variety of birds.
This little Cosmos is the most recent such gift. We’ve had such a long period of extreme heat and drought this summer followed by a couple of autumnal storms, so it really was a surprise to discover her, standing proud and flourishing in a gravel area.
Isn’t she beautiful?
It’s gifts like these which make a garden such a delight
Leave a Reply