A Normandy Garden

Spring has Sprung, ‘Sumer is icumen in’ as the old Anglo-Saxon poem says and, in addition, July is busting out all over. I can’t keep pace with it what with weeds and flowers and fruit and all.

Don’t get me wrong, I love gardens and I love mine because it has taken me the best part of 30 years to establish and I think it looks just as I planned. I just hate the work especially at this time of year.

The winter can be a long slow preparation which I seem to be able to take in my stride but European gardens are at their best in May, June and July and I just cannot keep up with this riotous dance of Mother Nature, as plants and weeds elbow each other out of the way, pushing and shoving to get a bit of lebensraum.

When we first bought this house it was sitting in the middle of a field so we had to lay gravel down or try and drive along the muddy ruts slewing and skidding.

In those days, I had a gardener, who dug out the tracks for me and I was supposed to tip the gravel in for him to rake. Unfortunately, the gravel froze and I had to go out and buy a pick and shovel to move the gravel. Backbreaking.

We created a roundabout which now houses an 18th century cider press, filled with flowers and decorated with hanging baskets. We fenced in all the orchards and only replanted those about 10 years ago. We now make cider so the best part about the garden is that it feeds and waters us and the sheep and it looks just like a 17th Century Cider House garden should.

The sheep stay in the orchard and keep the grass down beneath the cider apple trees, except when they are leaping the fence to eat the neighbour’s roses. I had to plant chain link and hedgerows last year to save the neighbour’s roses.

My tiny front garden is enclosed with a neat little picket fence (made by handy husband ) in some sort of exotic wood like teak which only looks better left to age naturally. It is pleasantly covered with grey-green moss – a suitably ancient appearance.

This front garden is mostly herbs and a few edible roses, which I make into jam or ice cream. The Apothecary’s rose, Gallica Officinalis, is deep red, with two rows of petals and countless thorns. It flowers only once in the summer so I have to gather petals every day early in the morning or they fade and fall away.

I planted several varieties of thyme and I usually have to replace a few every Spring. This year the rigours of winter did for my rosemary and my Italian myrtle, which is like a small bay leaf and gives a lovely rich flavour to a good roast chicken. My sorrel is sprouting away as I don’t have time to pick and cook it before it withers. I make up a certain amount of sorrel sauce to eat with Wild Scottish or Canadian salmon but time is short in June.

There’s parsley — two or three varieties — basil, which needs a lot of sun and the god who rules over Normandy is not generous with sun, chamomile, coriander, comfrey, wild celery, chervil, chives, mints, marigold, dill, fennel, feverfew, rhubarb, rocket, rue, rosemary and lavender, angelica and scores of others whose names I forget and which turn up in other parts of the garden splashing colour under the apple trees.

This year all three cherry trees have an abundance of fruit. I have to be up with the lark or he and all the sparrows and starlings will twitter away in the trees chomping on cherries as they exchange birdie girlie-gossip.

I’ll have to set to with cherries in alcohol, Clafoutis (I made two this week already) and cherry jams. It’ll soon be the turn of the quinces and damsons to ripen and fall into my floury hands so that I can turn them into pies and preserves.

Every evening as the heat of the sun wears off, clutching a glass of crisp cold cider clumsily in my fist, I wander about watering the herbs, the roses and the hanging baskets, sipping as I go, my eyes blinded by the riot of colour before me and my nose filled with the warm scents of flowers and herbs.

I suppose it is all worth it. It’s better than pushing up daisies, for sure.

Photo Credits

All photos © Julia Mclean

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