Spring bouquet

fruit treesI keep this large pot just at the front door. And all year round I try my best to fill it with interesting flowers and plants.  I do take it in during the coldest winter months as it is bound to crack from the cold and it would make me miserable.

These pots are typical in France; called grès. Stonewware pots which are mainly used to preserve meat in salt. One rarely finds the lovely ceramic lids – but I don’t mind.  I have ‘amassed’ a collection of four of them now. No five, we keep one inside full of sunflower seeds for the bird feeders.

Because of their former lives as preserving jars, they often havDSC01849e way too much residue salt inside to risk them for anything but decorative vases. I cut down large five litre plastic drink bottles to serve as vases for my flowers inside.

Running outside in winter one doesn’t really stop to admire fetching twigs. (Sorry, I was wandering off about the stoneware pots and forgot that I was talking about when I put out mine.)

I have cheated with my first blossom display of the year.  Our blossom isn’t out just yet.  Not even the wild cherries.  But just one hundred metres down the road there is an abandoned orchard. One gets to appreciate that just a few hundred metres in altitude will make a huge difference in the flowering times.

I noticed as I was walking through the forest down to the letter box what a stunning display the trees were producing.

Now some people nfruittrees1ever fail to carry a mobile phone, or their wallet in their pockets.  Me, it’s a pair of secateurs.

So when no one was watching. And let’s be frank, this is one of the most isolated parts of this area, I whipped out my secateurs and cut off some low hanging branches.

I then twinkled off the road as fast as I could and hauled my lovely branches home.

Artur was not impressed. (He’s actually trying to get me to open the front door.) But the solitary bees we have nesting all along the outside walls of the stone farmhouse did get some bonus blossom.