Now how exciting is this? A pile of chipped branches. Bet you just yearn for the day when I can actually take photograph of flowers and other frilly things. But this is winter and it’s the hard landscaping season. And posts of worthy garden areas are what you get.

And believe me, when you have spent the day dragging the branches from the far end of the property (they always fall out of the wheelbarrow on the slopes), dumping them in a heap near the house. Wheeling out the mighty Viking, and then spending a din-filled hour creating mulch you have to feel a teensy bit proud.

Their final destination is the shade garden (another ponderous walk) and hopefully will suppress the millions of weeds that will compete with my paltry flowers under the chestnut and mirabelle trees. This shot looks suspiciously like one that you will see later down the page. You can see how proud I must be of this achievement to make you see it twice.

Another little project was to create a proper compost bin up near the potting shed for future weeds and plant matter. This one is hopefully going to be disguised under a mountain of chestnut leaves later in the year. And it is below the wall, so out of sight when you turn the corner of the garden and see the shed. It looks frightfully woodland and twee right now. Learning how to weave chestnut saplings is playful believe me.

And to finish here is a shocking bit of green. This will break up the wood chip monotony. My sweet peas have germinated and are fighting to get out of their root trainers. Let’s hope the peas (purple podded if you please) will emulate them when we finally have some spring.

Gad I feel virtuous; I am up to date. Off to the other side of the world for a fortnight, where I promise to fret about the plants back in the shed.

Here’s one I wrote earlier. These are my scattered notes from the 2nd January. Twas a day up at the top potager and one where I noticed that this mountain is really seeping from the rain. Even in the vegetable bed I find rivulets of water. Not as dramatic as the Doulet river below the house, but it felt like it after I had been kneeling in the soil for an hour and wondered why the words hypothermia were forming on my cold lips.

This slope on the top of the vegetable bed is wasted ground. It is rocky, weedy and does nothing to help with the production of food crops or flowers. So I am afraid I am hiding by planting lots of cranberry plants. Canneberge to the keen. I managed to split the big potsI brought over from Blackmoor nurseries into six plants. So they are all in a row up the bank. With miracles and luck that whole bank will be covered in cranberries in a few years time.  If they keep well watered. The two at the far left end were the ones that are sited near the underground water spring, so they may do well.  But then again, if it gets hot and dry like last year they will have to rely on the charity of she who wields the watering can.

Trying to put down more fabric is quite a jigsaw. It’s unsightly but I just know I don’t have the fight for another season of such heavy duty weeding. It may be that this is the last picture of the top vegetable bed you will see for a bit. Too ugy for words with all that black fabric.

In fact I’m not sure just how much will go up there. One row of potatoes, and two of garlic. But the lower vegetable bed really is large enough for us. And there are the asparagus to wait for. And now the soft fruit.

And when digging up near the cranberries I have managed to save the heeled in cuttings of fruit bushes from last year. I may just make it a more soft fruit garden up there.

Or when I’m really grown up, get a polytunnel.

And by a miracle of tardy blogging here is the seamless link to last week when I worked up at the top plot again. This time it was to attack all the brambles that grow so lustily along the fence. Feisty critters, and really hard to shift when the growing season is upon them. Up with the fork which already has an Ardeche bend to it (that’s the granite stones it encounters on an almost daily dig). Plunge, lift, twist. And then once I had done the whole length, down to the yanking and swearing and removing. Thank goodness for thick gloves.

I had to swing out and hold on for dear life yanking the brambles from the outside. But it did mean that I visited one part of the huge garden for the first time. And naturally my thoughts have turned to improvements. One day I can see a whole thicket of miscanthus grass here – swaying in the breeze and hopefully smothering the weeds. I have the seeds, and the ambition. Let’s hope they will germinate in the spring.

Well there is just no putting it off. I need to get these pictures onto the site, heading off to Australia and I am trailing notes and images. The tags on these pictures say the 12th. Was that the 12th December? It must have been. So here come three random shots of more snowfalls. The olive trees seem to have survived the winter. And it has been a long winter here. Still frosts almost every night and getting to minus eight once earlier this month.

The conifers took a beating – particularly up in the forest. The weight of the snow caused so many branches to snap that we spent the first day of our new year trip just cutting and moving fallen trees and debris.

Poor trees. And naturally they all came too late for me to turn them into Christmas tree branches for the house. Instead they were heaved onto the stacks of dying and drying branches in the forest. And in just two years from now they are going to make spiffing kindling.

The other fun and games revolved around the spring. The water in the taps in the house had a – how shall we say it? – stale odour. And climbing up to the forest and peering into the underground spring we found out why. All that flooding rain in October had entirely silted up the supply. It’s a wierd picture, but somewhere in there is a bubbling spring. Luckily it was a sunny day – even though only about six degrees. Digging and scraping and bailing like mad for two hours produced a result.

We now have flowing water again and it tastes very sweet. Too much water of course. We really must get on with creating new ponds for the top vegetable plot. This overflowing winter water really ought to go somewhere more useful.

No rest for the virtuous mind you, next it was on with more soil preparation in the lower vegetable bed: weed free. Such bliss. And note that you can actually spot where the veg are growing now that the snow has melted. I need to order more enviromesh to cover the cloches in spring. Lurking under the far right cloche are eighty little mache (salad) plants. Poor things are frozen in their soil and not putting on any growth. But who knows? Come March they may bulk out and provide food when we are truly sick and tired of that blasted kale.

A day of soil and toil: but at long last I can tick a big job off my list. I have finally moved all the spare soil from beside the potting shed down to the wall behind the pool. It took all morning and involved lots of little loads and some rather energetic flinging of buckets down the slopes. But it is done.  And what a vast space it now is on this western side of the shed. I never imagined it would be such a space.  Michel has pruned the big tree nearby so there will be less shade. And Nicolas has made a great start on steps down. I will even do a bit of work and bury the water troughs a bit better too.

But egads I haven’t enough plants to cover this area in the spring. I have a nascent plan, but no more. The plants that did well here were the Agastache Liquorice Blue and the grasses.  I have collected lots of seeds so I will try and sow as many Agastache as I can hereabouts. But I don’t want to take on too many parts of the garden and do them all half well. So I may have to cover it in fabric while I concentrate on getting the other side done first.

My back didn’t hurt after all this work (being very careful and taking lots of breaks for cups of tea), so I went even further and added a lot more soil to the area that was another eyesore. The buried electricity cables in front of the house. A generous sowing of grass seeds in spring and you might never notice that bright red electricity cables lurk just underneath.

After lunch it was time to do another procrastination chore. Chipping. From brown to beige in just a few hours. Whizz. And I even had some leftover for the large shade garden that is the main flower fest of the garden.

A housekeeping day: out came all the plants, out came the brooms, brushes and boxes. And about five hours later I have a neat and tidy potting shed.  I am so conscious that these poor plants have to be abandoned for a few weeks, so they needed to be well sorted before I go away. 

And I think they rather enjoyed getting their sun kicks. Glorious again today; I watered the lot and even decided that some of the plants could just go in the soil. Risky, risky mad I know. But they are going to die in their pots if the weather warms up too much mid Feb in that potting shed.  So into the soil they went.

And it felt so darn organised and semi-professional. Had to race to the house to get my planting schemes from the noticeboard, then plot them on the ground where I thought they would fit.  It is going to be a thin year. Only three Thalictrum Elin plants where I wish I had thirteen. But propagation will happen. But not right now.

What else did I do today? Time seemed to just ooze along. I suspect I looked yet again at that soil pile in the shady side of the shed and put it off for another day. I need to move it just thirty feet down to the terrace behind the pool. But gravity is about the only thing that is on my side: I have to heave it somehow down the hill.

Or put it in buckets and plod down the unfinished gap in the stone wall, down the steps taking care not to step on the newly sown grass on the treads, negotiate the elderflower tree, and down more steps with more seedlings and then throw the soil onto the ground. I had considered doing another slide – but actually it proved almost as difficult as plodding.

Tomorrow perhaps. And I need to make yet more mulch. The bark chips (bargain sale from Chabeuil Gamm Vert as the bags had all rotted. They emptied themselves all over the tarp in the back of the car Thursday night) are down on the bed but they are way too dark and obvious. So they are going to need a top dressing of the more camoflagued home made bark chips tomorrow. If I can steal the time.  I still haven’t finished the lower potager: the cabbage needs to come up. I did cut back the parsley and do some minor weeding. But the back was protesting and demanding I stop. Oh, and sunset appeared too. Hate that. Puts a premature end to one’s day.

I owe you all a week of news: The pictures are scaled and sitting on the computer, the notes are scrawny but extant. But I just haven’t managed to find the time to sit down and fill in the week over New Year in the garden. Glorious winter weather but the ground was so frozen it was hard to get as many tasks done as I had hoped. I shall try and catch up this week.

This is real winter weather that we are experiencing. Bringing back happy memories for the old timers who can recall this sort of sustained cold. We are adjusting, but my plants are not sure about this change in their circumstances.  Actually we had a cold snap in London too – so much so that I had to bring the plants in from the roof terrace as they were freezing out there as well.

Dormant perennials do look rather odd. And luckily the security staff at Eurostar are well used to me by now not to do more than roll their eyes at the mad woman bringing through a bag with 16 pots of… dead plants.  They are safely installed in the potting shed under a roll of bubble wrap, so are close to their final home. I wish it was warm enough to get them in the soil, but it will have to wait until February.

We had the coldest nights in the past week. Down to minus eight in the evening once, and generally around minus two or three now. But sunny in the day and one feel positively frisky in the heat when it reaches 6 Celsius and you are digging or hauling and have to remove a few layers of fleece.

Isn’t the light in these pictures extraordinary. These are the late afternoon must go up and see all the newly strimmed top terrace work shots.  Nicolas needed a job to do that didn’t require trying to get cement to bond in frozen weather, so he has turned his mighty strimmer on this top part of  the property.

So lovely to be bramble free for a few months at least. And reducing some of the cistus forest. Spanish broom to some, Genet, mighty troublesome weeds to me. They grow into tall bushes of inpenetrable thickness if you leave the strimming for a year.  So we are now all clear in most parts of the property.

I want to turn my attention to the top potager again this week. Have great plans to dig out the rogue bramble roots that have bedded in beside the fencing wire around the perimeter. But will the soil be soft enough to dig? Perhaps later in the day. Instead I shall go up (well rugged up as it is still around O Celsius) and have a potter in the potting shed. More plants to try and squeeze in. The Eupatorium Purpureum seeds which I germinated in the warmth over Christmas need their cold period for six weeks. That won’t be hard.