And that is exactly what we did. We came back with a bucketful of produce – tomatoes, peppers, a huge cabbage, and a book on trees. Michel did come back with us and we did a walk around the property. He thinks it will only take a morning to do all the tree work up near the pool and the potting shed. Amazingly efficient. But the cherry trees will have to wait until spring. But they definitely need a tidy. And we may get some maple trees. There is a local variety – which Nicolas was able to instantly describe – Acer monspessulanum – which should do well at Marsanoux. They don’t mind the wind, and have a beautiful autumn colour. So we may plant three of them up on the top terrace way near the woods. We have some lovely gentle autumn colour, but not that fiery stop and gasp red which you always want at this time of year.

There are plenty of brambles to dig out on the top terrace. I noticed that when Jan and I went up there for a sunset walk last night to take the final holiday photos and look at the water supply. (It’s low. But Jean-Daniel has said the same thing, so I know it’s not just us.)

And there is more indoor work next month to get through. Bernard and Florent came up to help with the insulation of the water pipes that are outside. The polystyrene and bags of straw had to go down to protect from the cold. And I need more insulating wool for the top water tank. And we are going to seal up the first floor windows a bit more securely. All this work for the cold is new. But it’s fun. We have to leave the heating on to ensure the pipes don’t freeze. But only just ticking over. And hopefully next week it will all be activity. New roof, new decking around the pool, and best of all – hopefully some good sun tunnels to get some light into the house. In summer it was easy – we just opened all the doors to let in light. But in winter it really is necessary to leave the lights on in the daytime just to see through the gloom.

Have to mooch around waiting for the fuel tanker to come and top up the huge tanks under the house for our central heating. And it may be spent sowing the broad bean seeds in the lower vegetable garden. I really need to get stuck into the top garden and get those weeds out – but it will be too far from the house and I may miss phone calls. (Still hoping for a response from the new chimney sweep).

And then at two we are going to visit Nicolas’ vegetable garden at the chateau (a good touristy thing to do to show Jan while she is here), and meet a new garden friend – a tree surgeon. He will come back here and we can walk through what trees need work. The ones above the potting shed need trimming, and a few need to come out above, near the road to Jean-Daniel’s. But Nicolas warned us that he won’t just come to trim a few trees, so we should get our cherry trees pruned as well. The ones near the house are way too tall and straggly. So a good tidy up will be fun.

‘And now shall we refresh your peach trees?’ I learn so much vocabulary with Nicolas  when we garden together. But this lovely term had me rolling about. Way too precious a term for our straggly bunch of trees.

We started the day with moving logs. You have to do things that keep you warm until the sun really gets over the mountain. Nicolas kept up his work on the trench above the wall. I did potting up – the winter lettuce. And then raced over to the Mairie in St Michel de Chabrillanoux to get a permit to burn the rubbish on the second lower terrace. You have to call the fire brigade before you start a big fire to ensure it’s a good safe day to do it. And warn them there may be a conflagration.

And now that I have finally made contact with M. Brun the bulldozer guy I realised that we need to give all the information about the work to be done to Nicolas as well. If I’m not here, it would be dreadful if he arrived and bulldozed a minor amount of terrace and then left. And Nicolas has kindly agreed to oversee the two days of bulldozing work. So we walked the course. Flattening here, building up there, digging out stumps. It all makes sense now that we have talked it over. And Nicolas has a friend who can work on the smaller wall work after the major terracing. So even if M. Brun does just the big stuff, we can get on with other more creative things at a later date.

And then this afternoon it was fruit day. We started with a lesson on how to prune plums. It’s a bit scary but I am slowly being inculcated into the dark arts of pruning. Naturally I was too reluctant to do much more than the obvious dead little bits while he was launching himself up above me on the bigger branches. The trees don’t look like they have been tended to for a few years. We can only trim a bit each year. Well, it looks like a big whack to me. But they look so much better. We have agreed to take out one of the seedlings that has grown up in between the plums. Just too crowded.

And then once I had hauled the branches to the huge pyre, it was on with the peaches. They are chaotic as the seedlings have been allowed to grow up into adults between the other adults. Crowded goblets of peachiness. But in we went. Secateurs flying and getting the mess tidied up. Did I dare to ask Nicolas to look at the roses in the courtyard as well? No problem; up we went and in about ten minutes the two straggly plants look bare and sorry for themselves. But won’t they be brilliant next year.

Payments in advance for the hiring of the motorized tractor – we need to collect stones for all the walls we want to build around the pool and the potager. Ambitious plans believe me. And Nicolas went off into the sunset while I ducked down to do a bit more watering. And raking up of the peach leaves that have scattered themselves all over the terrace below the house.

It’s been a reflective afternoon – for the first time I am really doing gardening chores. And I realise that actually getting stuck into raking a bit of grass the size of a tennis court means that I learn so much more about it, rather than hearing someone strimming it from a distance. I get to see how the weeds grow, what the terraces look like (some seem to have been built up from rubble with only a thin covering of top soil). And it gives me plenty of time to think about how it will be transformed.

I have found the perfect spot for raising seedlings: in the niche of the living room that faces south. It means I can put them there without worrying they will take a battering. One of the trays is for Nicolas – we are going to visit his chateau on Wednesday. And the rest are for the winter garden.

It has been perfectly sunny here this month. But windy and cold. But perfect weather for stalking about and thinking how to make it pretty. I can’t do any major work just yet. Patience, patience. But I planted twenty Mount Tacoma tulips to the wisteria bed this afternoon (waiting for Bernard to visit) and added fifteen narcissi bulbs– Bridal Crown – as well. It’s amazing how you think you have plenty and the area just swallows them up. I had to add more topsoil to the bed to give them the right depth. It’s rather a rocky bed. And what it really needs is a shrub under the wisteria that won’t get mighty leggy. And won’t be bright yellow as the last one was. Another daphne perhaps?

We also planted 120 snow bunting crocus in the lawn (hah!) near the barbecue. What do we call that garden? The quince garden? The east garden? I tried that trick I have seen on TV. All the little crocus in a bucket and they you just roll them across the lawn in a dramatic gesture of scattering the bulbs in an artistic manner and then plant them where they fell. Didn’t work. The poor tiny bulbs just snagged on the first tussock of grass and fell in a crowded crumpled heap. That will teach me for pretending we have a sward of grass that will accommodate bulbs so easily. Jan laboured at removing all the stones that lie just below the surface. And we then decided to just remove the topsoil altogether. It took ages. But then we planted the bulbs in as random an order as we possibly could and then put soil back over the top. A water with the one hose we have – which is so long that it seems to reach all parts of the garden, but kills your arms lugging it about.

And then the next day used some of the leftover grass seed from Lynn and Jeff and scattered it over the top. But it looks so bitty. Just a tiny patch of crocus in a huge lawn. So I will have to buy hundreds more if it is going to have an effect.

Well what is the progress today? Not a lot of my own – Nicolas and Bernard have finished building the terrace wall above the pool; a work of art. And I have done a bit of planting. Jan is here to see the life we have in France and have a good inspection of the progress so far. And to help she has been weeding the lower vegetable bed most of the day. Next to her in the lower bed, I planted 18 little lettuce seedlings, weeded yet more between the rows of Swiss chard and cabbage. And harvested a few of the crops already in place.

Last night we arrived at 10pm, five hours later than scheduled after a wildcat train strike had us stranded in Lille. The tooth fairy must have been looking after us as we managed to ‘hitch’ a lift with another stranded passenger who hired a car and drove us all the way to Valence train station where we parked our car. But it meant we arrived in the pitch dark. Just time to creep down to the garden by the light of the moon and snatch a few Swiss chard leaves to cook in our evening meal.

The vegetable beds are taking shape. The chard is growing so lustily that it looks well settled for the winter. The radish are monstrous and no doubt woody. But I’m leaving them in as they look decorative. And the cabbage and the spinach are coming along nicely. In between the cabbage plants I have transplanted the little winter lettuce seedlings. I sowed them in compost before I left last time, and here they are, putting on their true leaves in just a few weeks.

The onions and garlic seem to be fine. Putting on a bit of growth. Tricky weeding between the rows, but thank goodness everything is ruler straight and marked out with string.

I must get up to the top plot and have a good weed. Nicolas has said that the raspberry trellis won’t go in until the end of winter. He has to make the chestnut poles from the chateau’s forest, and they won’t be ready for a few months. But I really should dig in the compost that is on the surface of the garden.

We found time to collect a bucketful of chestnuts from the lower terraces on our walk around the property. No other fruit left – perhaps some walnuts to gather. But it feels like winter is here and despite the sun, things are ending.

But it’s going to be a good few months of thinking about planting. Nicolas had to water the bank above the pool this afternoon. It seems counterintuitive, but he is trying to encourage all the brambles into growth so he can zap them with Round Up. He needs a bit of green first. And then once they are dead we can cover them with a weed proof fabric. And then plant with grasses. We had a short conversation about grasses as I was doing some laps getting more stones for the wall. Apparently some grass seeds are bad news fro the swimming pool liner. So we will need to plant sterile plants (like the very popular calamagrostis Karl Forester) or something that won’t seed all over the place. But we have a month before the panic of planting starts at least.

I forgot water the Mahonia and the daphne. Excuse me while I dump a bucket of water on both. They look fine. Not suffering terribly. And that is a relief.

What a cracking day. Blazing sunshine about 20 Celsius; one of those Indian summer days which just feel so inspiring for people who feel they have lost their summer too early. And to get in the right gardening mood, I have spent most of the day at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Wisley Garden. Only a 45 minute drive from our Knightsbridge flat. Which is odd, as it takes me about that long just to battle through the traffic north to the allotment.

I wanted to get a good autumn look at the Piet Oudolf borders that are in the garden; and I am so glad I did. First of all it felt like a pilgrimage to be seeing a planting design that I have been reading about in one of my ‘library’ books. But also it was a salutary lesson in the live state of gardens. In the book they are divine – and in proportion and neat. Well, as neat as the Natural Planting style gets. But now a few years on you can see how the borders have developed.

And there are huge successes, but also some odd sights.  It doesn’t look like anyone has taken a pair of secateurs to any part of the border. The rudbeckias are way too large, some of the gaura bushes are trying to escape into another part of the garden altogether, and many of the Echinacea plants and the Heleniums look tragic at the end of their season.  But many of the grasses are absolutely divine, and very inspirational. And the entire border is very bold indeed. I wonder what neat gardeners think of them.

I took heaps of photos, but they wont show up too well as the sun was just so glaring and I only arrived there at 10am (the second the gates opened).

I stalked off up to the fruit and herb gardens, did a lap of the show gardens, stuck my head down the traditional English borders (bursting with late summer treats) and then ended up photographing almost every grass variety in the grass borders outside the restaurant. Too early for lunch, I went into the lovely little library and devoured the extra books on designing with grasses that I haven’t on my desk already.

I think I have narrowed the choices for the bank down to two (or three) designs.

A single block planting of prairie dropseed – Sporobolus heterolepis (Prairie dropseed)
A single block planting of miscanthus Gracillimus (Maiden grass)

Naturally I wanted to buy examples of each grass to show David and give them a winter trial in the garden to see if they are hardy. The books were not unanimous on their hardiness. I think Marsanoux is Zone 7 on the hardiness chart that was developed in the United States, and some books said the prairie dropseed was only hardy to zone 4, but others said 8.  But the sample of miscanthus was enormous – too tall really to take on the train; and I couldn’t find any drop seed. I did bring back another small pot of another grass (sorry the name escapes me) and it’s lovely. But I need to do more hunting. We are off to Ponteland this weekend and I want to stalk about the Dobbies garden centre and see what they have.

I couldn’t resist buying five small euphorbia plants. The Wulfenii variety, it is about six months too early to be buying such things, but you can’t really escape a great plant shop empty handed.

I also bought 120 crocus snow bunting bulbs. Tiny little things; but they are the ones that Christopher Lloyd preferred at his garden at Great Dixter. Plus six Regal lily bulbs, two packets of verbena bonariensis seeds, Echinacea, nicotiana sylvestris and black paeony poppy seeds. And ten more allium purple sensations. Not sure where I am going to put them. I really have to come up with a grander garden plan.