Air traffic control, SNCF, and the weather, all managed to inconvenience our visitors in 2016. Not only in France, Dominique and Jean-Marie had their trip to Scotland disrupted by both French air traffic control and Scotrail.

First to suffer were Rae & Ben, who had a circuitous trip from Barcelona to Lalinde at the end of March

They were at least lucky with the weather.

The radiologists enjoyed some sunshine in May

but also a very wet day at Oradour sur Glane, perhaps in keeping with the history of the site.

By June the rain had set in, and my Dad abandoned his walking trip in the Massif Central for the relative shelter of the Dordogne, but there was flooding, notably at Beynac, where the riverside restaurants were under water.

All change by July, cannicule and virtually no rain all summer. The prairie needed watering even in its second season.

It did well though, with the more established plants, those that had survived, flowering well in their second season.

Stars of June were the phlomis, which had not done particularly well in their first year

 

and by July it was again a blaze of colour

and Phillipe’s hedge was growing well(!), he did cut it down, despite the heat, later in the year.

The tree paeony in the Mediterranean garden can look scruffy much of the year, but earns its keep in April.

The Gravel Garden recovers quickly from winter pruning and was back in full flower by June,

 

while closer to the house the Cercis and Cistus were also in a delight in May.

The bulbs and perennials I had planted in Walnut Terrace the previous September added a welcome splash of spring colour,

as did the shrubs by the gate

and the zantedeschia in my new bed on the lowest terrace survived the winter.

The salvias I had planted above the lower cave the previous April flowered all summer.

A year of consolidation, plenty of weeding, and some re-planting, rather than any new departures. Time, in September, as the trees began to turn

and the morning mists gathered over the river

to plan the next phase.

The creaking, and gradually sinking, floor in the sitting room came up at the end of September, allowing us to discover just how close to the underlying rock the house had been built.

John and Liz visited in October and had to make do with plywood floor covering and limited furniture as we waited for the concrete to dry. The new parquet was installed in November.

I had spent a good bit of September, armed with Jan’s original planting plan, occasionally at variance with the final execution, trying to work out which plants in the prairie had not survived. A reminder of my trainee days in radiology where one of the lessons was how difficult it is to “see” something which is not there! The replacement plants arrived in November, in hundreds rather than thousands this time. I went out alone to re-plant, and open the house for the carpenters. This put my schedule somewhat behind, as I had hoped, beginning to realise the scale of the task I had set myself, to start the winter clearing of the perennials that month.

November also brought the wine tasters and a long awaited trip to dinner at the Troisgros restaurant in Roanne. After which the male members of the party, with Peter supervising, were set to clear the old bonfire, an eyesore in the middle of the prairie,

and then constructed a splendid walk in wooden composter which I had managed to source on Amazon and which turned up, flatpacked, and in instalments, over several days.

The rest of the winter was quiet. We saw a bit of our neighbours, Francoise and Phillipe, who had finally succeeded in selling their business in Cannes and retiring to “rural” tranquillity.

By February, with some greatly welcome help from Vicky and Fabien, all the grasses and perennials in the gravel garden and prairie were cut to the ground and we had a new, but better sited, bonfire. The reward was a few days skiing in Bequeira Beret, plentiful fresh snow, zero visibility, and the discovery of the pinxhos bar in Arties, which remains a great incentive to return.

My “white bed” intended to left the gloom by the gate, was flowering by March

along with the genista, slow to establish but now more in need of vigorous pruning than cosseting.

 

 

Although the prairie was absorbing that summer, the rest of the garden was not neglected.

Rick came for a week in May, and more than earned his keep, strimming, a task he seemed to enjoy more than Peter does, cleaning the pool lid, and clearing out two large and grossly overgrown iris clumps on the lower terrace.

Walnut terrace was beginning to look more like a flowerbed, at least on the north side,

and I continued with clearing the narrow border on the south side with a view to planting bulbs in the autumn.

Jan’s team also completed their work on the water feature, and we homed the ducks imported from Argyll.

The flaw only became apparent in later in the year when we hosted a party to celebrate John’s 50th birthday. I switched on the, until then barely used, cascade, to celebrate the event, and wandered off to work elsewhere in the garden. When I returned a few hours later the pond was all but empty. Clearly the water being pumped up to feed the cascade was not returning to refill it. Fabien nobly returned several times over the subsequent months, plugging all possible gaps with cement, and by autumn the problem seemed more or less resolved, although we still top the pond up when running the cascade for more than short bursts of time.

The flowerbed adjacent to the pond has also proved a challenge, south facing and dry, with limited soil cover, it remains a work in progress as I try various plants, a few succeed, but many fail.

Despite these problems, the water lilies bloomed in their first season.

The Iris were beginning to do well

and some at least of the roses were surviving the depredations of the deer.

Other tasks that summer included a gravel design to conceal the ugly stone basin around the base of the angellos,

and a start on clearing the loose rocks around the mouth of the lower cave, which proved to be slow work.

In September the amaryllis finally flowered and were worth waiting for

That month I planted bulbs and ever more iris, and decided not to replace the large clump which Rick had cleared in May, but to create a new flowerbed instead

I also tried out a few alpines on the bank below, some of which have survived.

Growth in the prairie was now holding its own against the weeds, evidenced in the “aerial” photos Fabien took at the end of the month.

 

Spring of 2015 was hot and dry, not the best conditions for our new plants, and the early weeks were a race to weed and then get the mulch down before the weeds started again. The mulch, however, has proved a worthwhile investment, making it possible to work on the beds even in wet weather without sinking into the clay soil which adheres so well to our boots. The bunnies took their toll as well, digging more than nibbling, asserting their ancestral rights to the area we had chosen to turn into a garden. Peter invested in ultrasonic scarers, but they didn’t seem bothered!

The verbascum flowered first, in early May.

By June it was beginning to look like a garden.

Helenium and salvia nemerosa provided brilliant colour

and gaura and hemerocallis came into flower.

Achillea, asters and perovskia were flowering in July, along with a blaze of purple salvias,

by August we had monarda, echinacea and helianthus,

and the grasses were coming into their own.

By September the helianthus which had been an inch or so high in April were towering above my head and the asters were a blaze of colour. Hard to believe in so much growth in so short a time!

Not everything made it, of course. Bunnies apart, some of the plants we had chosen were probably not best suited to the conditions. The phlox barely grew, and although coreopsis has done well in some places has not survived in others. Most of the grasses did well, save the molinia, moor grass may do better on moors! In September I took an inventory of the gaps with a view to re-planting later in the year.

One concern however was resolved when our neighbour appeared bearing a pot of honey from his beehives. My anxieties about disrupting the local eco-system to the detriment of his bees were clearly groundless, they had profited from the experience, as we doubtless had from their efforts at pollination.