Her indoors

This seems perverse: but I am in my office at the laptop and the sun is blazing outside.   But I feel I just have to catch up on the news before making any more. Well, more of the garden variety. House guests, visitors, all lovely and distracting, but no time to just sit and think.

My concession to the garden is to have a huge bowl of roses on the desk next to me which I picked this morning, and to be scoffing just picked cherries from the tree. We took the new big ladder down to the first terrace and picked the first ripening big juicy fruits.

Yesterday I had a great visit from an old friend Susanne and a new friend Leslie. And how wonderful to have found another Ardeche gardener.   And full of great information about wild flowers, plants and their uses.   We picked a huge amount of elderflowers from the tree below the potting shed (and the one on the lower terrace next to the cherries).   I had plenty to make my first ever batch of elderflower champagne.

It is sitting whiffily in a bucket here in the office threatening to ferment.   And as soon as I haven finished this, I will take it down to the basement where it can do its work.   And late last night I was stripping the leaves off the other flower heads and hanging them up to dry.

I couldn’t find a more fetching hanging device at that late hour, so a tacky plastic coathanger it had to be.   I took it up to the potting shed this morning so it will dry away from the house.   There is a faint odour of cat’s pee about the elderflower at this stage – not the perfect house guest.

But drying flowers has inspired me: that and a tea recipe Leslie told me about yesterday. An elderly lady in the village offered her a pot of tea which was a mix of elderflower, vervaine, sage, tilleul and raspberry leaf.   I can manage everything but the tilleul. I think there is a large tree down at Le Buisson which I may be able to raid.   But it did inspire me to go out and pick off some lemon verbena leaves. The drying process begins.