Clever cuttings

Five pm and I’m flagging. It must be about 99 per cent humidity here today, and around 28C.   Not the best weather for charging about.   But that is what I seem to be doing. Lots of people here doing electrics, digging trenches for new outdoor sink, and gardening.

Well beefy gardening. The landscaping sort. I need to move the large collection of soil that was left over after Gilles’ heroic efforts above the gite.   And to move it, I decided to move up the winter project of adding more terraces to the bank above the potting shed.

The little thin beds we made last year (or was it the year before?) are well settled. The calamagrostis Karl Foerester are fine and thriving, and the echinacea purpuruea Magnus have survived the worst of winter and the driest of summers.   So they are a plant to stay and expand. The eupatorium purpureum isn’t as happy. The poor plants look a touch thin and straggly.   And won’t last in the new re-design I suspect.   But there are sedums, valerian, antirrhinums, achilleas, eragrostis, some cosmos and lots of verbena bonariensis crammed into the thin beds.   Now it’s time to expand.

But to do that Nicolas had to collect the long logs from the forest, and I needed to dig over the soil. And boy does it look poor. Dry and pale and undernourished. I don’t dare plant anything here until I’ve well manured and tended and nurtured.

But speaking of nurturing; here’s a success. I took cuttings from the santolina, the lavender, the gaura and the sarriette (a sort of thyme) in the spring.   Struck them in pots of gritty compost, covered them with plastic bags and then stuck them away in the potting shed under the tables.   And would you believe they actually worked. They usually die on me as I insist on trying to keep them alive over the long winter.

But today I was almost humming a happy tune as I potted them on and admired the future plants. It almost makes me want to do more. But instead it’s builders’ mate work instead. Ah well, there’s always tomorrow for more.