In way of these things in small villages Bruno lived in this house when he was a child and was amazed to see what we have done with it, and thoroughly approved of the way the house is heading - which is nice.
Grape flowers are not unattractive looked at up close, but they are not exactly spectacular. Sadly, neither is the fruit that this particular grape produces, although we were assured when we bought the orchard that this rampant grape vine that had climbed up into the paulownia gave wonderfully sweet and delicious red grapes. Unfortunately the payoff with muscat grapes is that they are small, squishy and full of seeds. Give me a nice medium sized Australian sultana grape any day, seedless and firm fleshed that goes 'pop!' in the mouth.
This afternoon at about 14.33 we will stand in the garden and open a bottle of something cold, refreshing and bubbly to mark 5 years on from that moment.
Susan
Glanville Fritillary.
They are not easy for beginners to tell apart, but with a little practice and knowing what to look for, you can do it.
Glanville Fritillary.
Knapweeds are bigger and the orange (fauve) of their uppersides tends to be in alternating bands of strong brick red and then a more yellowy band. The Glanville's fauve is evenly coloured. Crucially, Glanvilles have a row of black spots on their bottom wings and Knapweeds do not.
All of a sudden I can carry the bins more than 3/4 full. It still requires smooth driving, but I haven't spilled a drop the past two days.
About an hour later, the pompiers' car was back, this time in the painter's workshop we can see from our upstairs window. This time I think they were dealing with "hazardous fumes", because they were all in breathing equipment.
In the new bathroom, the tiling is approaching being finished. We have ordered the plinthe (skirting) tiles and hope for them to arrive by Friday lunchtime. This means we can finish the tiling this coming weekend.
On Saturday I indulged in a bit more integrating (as it is apparently known) going on my first outing with the Association de Botanique et de Mycologie de Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine. The Sainte Maure de Touraine Botany and Mycology Club may have started off as its title indicates, but these days it is really the Touraine Field Naturalists Club. The focus on Saturday was orchids in the Chaumussay area, so it was a great one for me to start with. I was the only non-French person attending, although that may have been influenced by the fact that Marc Fleury, the club's orchid expert, was also leading a walk from Ligueil on Sunday which had received quite wide publicity due to the switched-on Ligueil Tourist Office.
I enjoyed the afternoon immensely, getting two new orchid species and several new plants from other families on my personal checklist, as well as some good photos of a butterfly and a dragonfly I have been chasing for a couple of weeks. However, it was quite hard work on the language front, and just keeping up with the discussion amongst some nicely nerdy naturalists was fairly taxing. As I didn't know anyone else present, Marc took me under his wing, in the way that personable Frenchmen of a certain age do. Somewhat embarrassingly he introduced me as 'his colleague from Australia who is interested in the dipteran pollinators of orchids'. Perfectly true, except that as yet I know very little about what flies pollinate which orchids, but Marc several times asked me to confirm information or if I had anything to add to what he was saying. Yikes!
I was also put on my mettle by Jean, who showed me a series of fantastically good photos taken with a microscope and stored on his camera. He was curious to know if I knew what the creatures were. He, of course, knew exactly what species they were. Since the photos were of mites, ticks, fleas, pseudoscorpions and strange flat wingless flies that parasitise bats - all tiny, ugly and brown - I think I did OK by being able to identify them at least to family level. Theoretically, we had a language in common - scientific Latin - but I found it quite tricky to remember to pronounce scientific names with a French accent. A simple example is 'pseudoscorpion'. In French, you pronounce the 'p' in words like 'psychiatrist', 'pneumatic' and 'pseudoscorpion'.
We visited three sites over the course of the afternoon. All three were excellent examples of the flora rich limestone spurs that run along the Claise Valley around Preuilly. The first I was already very familiar with, as it is one of my butterfly survey transects. Marc was a bit disappointed that he wasn't able to show me an orchid I hadn't already seen there. The second site was near La Forge, where we scrambled up the dry chalky slope to see Short-spurred Fragrant Orchid Gymnadenia odoratissima (Gymnadène odorante) in considerable numbers amongst the very prickly Juniper Juniperus communis (Genièvre) bushes (I am now covered in little scratches). Then it was off to a site the other side of Chaumussay, on a road that I have used as a shortcut many times without realising what treasure the woodland it cuts through holds. Here we found two rare orchids - Violet Limodore Limodorum abortivum (Limodore à feuilles avortées) in good numbers and the impossibly discreet Small-leaved Helleborine Epipactis microphylla (Epipactis à petites feuilles), as well as Moïse Aristobile's Black Pea Lathyrus niger (Gesse noire) and its pretty cousin, the garden worthy Long-leaved Crimson Clover Trifolium rubens (Trèfle rouge). All special plants associated with this special warm limestone habitat. In total we saw 16 species of orchids and a couple of hybrids for the afternoon.
The next outing near Preuilly is in June, to look at plants of damp places in the Forêt de Preuilly, and I will definitely be going.
If you know where to look, you can tell it was 2010, as well - you can see our garden improvements and the Velux that isn't, as well as the plots on the potager. It appears that being a Thursday Susan is just leaving to go to the supermarket, as the car is half in the courtyard and half on the road.
The only quibble I have is that it seems awfully green to be August. Last year was a dry year, so much so that we harvested very little in the way of vegetables.
In other news: Susan has finished sanding plaster (hoo-bally-ray!) and I have finished ridding tiles of excess glue. The question now is do I pose the tile plinthe before grouting or after?
We hadn't been there until yesterday, but it appears to be a really good brico shop - larger than Bricomarché, and with lots of things. Things are good, and the lifeblood of any restoration project, so I have no doubt we will be returning again soon.
Stéphane sanded our spare bedroom and both bathrooms, Simon did the office, so now it's my turn in the kitchen. Stéphane is busy working for a stonemason, Simon is allergic to the dust now, so if we want to paint the kitchen anytime soon, I have to sand the plaster smooth.
On Monday I was rescued at midday by my friend Louisa, who came round to invite me to lunch as she had someone she wanted me to meet turn up. Yesterday I ran out of sandpaper by lunchtime. Today, having finished the walls despite having dodged the job two afternoons in a row I am working on the ceiling. Extra double yuk!
Also currently affected is any work on canals and ponds that connect to the Indrois or its tributaries. Maintenance work on sluices and weirs means that water is inevitably lost, so it is forbidden.
Since February the rainfall in Indre-et-Loire has been between 30 and 50 mm. To bring it up to a normal amount, we need another 80mm. To deliver this effectively it would have to rain for a month virtually every day. We should get about 120mm during spring and 250mm in the first half of the year, but around Preuilly the spring rainfall has been at most 30mm. Some places in the area have had literally no spring rain.
The strawberries may be the best fruit crop we get for a while. We are not going to get many cherries. The first ones are ripe, but there is a total of about 20 on the tree and they are all too high for me to bother with. The other 3 sweet cherries and 4 sour have similar numbers of fruit, still green. I guess after two bumper years and dry summers the trees are stressed and the dry spring was the last straw. They need a rest year to recover. We are not going to get many peaches or red plums either. Pears look as though they may be better than last year, with the nashi having set some fruit too, and the apples are loaded with clusters of tiny fruit.
In the autumn I suppose I will have to dig up the strawberries and plant out new runners to ensure continued production, as the current plants are now two years old. Such drought hardy plants are worth maintaining, and we don't seem to get much pest or disease damage. They compensate a bit for the many vegetables that are not coping with the dry.
To do the photographs Eric was given access to Tourlet's herbarium collection and he realised that not only were the specimens in the collection from around Preuilly collected by Aristobile, but that many of them were collected from the hill in front of La Forge. He invited Jean Pelle, a botanist and retired agricultural college lecturer to lead a walk in honour of a now almost forgotten 19th century Preuilly plantsman. Moïse Aristobile's grand-daughter, Micheline Papon, who is now in her 80's I think, and lives in the next street to us, also attended and greatly enjoyed the focus on her grandfather.
Moïse Aristobile was born in 1864 at Vernou. He was orphaned and grew up in a convent, where he was apprenticed to the gardener. When he turned 18 he was placed in a chateau near Blois, and later in Tours, where he began to get serious about the science of botany and the need to know more about plants. He spent every spare cent on botany books and the Botanical Gardens in Tours supported him. After his military service he went to the chateau de la Brèche at Hommes, where he married, and after a spell at Pleumartin, came to Preuilly and set up his own gardening business.
His botanical knowledge was now well established, and his extraordinary physical stamina meant that he travelled all over the Touraine du Sud and the Brenne on his bicycle, collecting specimens and discovering new plants for the area. He amassed a herbarium collection of 1000 specimens and at the same time sent 300 duplicates to the French Central Western Botanical Society and the Museum of Natural History in Tours. In 1906 he gave his whole collection to the the City of Tours.
He died in 1937 and is buried in Preuilly. Nowadays, his name is known only to his descendents and to local botanists. I had read his name in one or two local botanical field guides, but otherwise knew nothing about him until this walk. Now I am keen to find some of the special plants, such as Black Pea Lathyrus niger, that he discovered in the calcareous grassy slopes and woodland above La Forge.
Both processes are going variously well: we join in many of the things that happen (even if we aren't sure what's happening some of the time) and with the kitchen properly underway we will soon be unpacking some of the boxes.
Tony very kindly gave me a complimentary copy. I didn't have anything to do with the production of the guide, but I had done some work for the LPO a while ago, and it was a nice thank you present.
My only disappointment is that they have not included us i.e. the Val de la Claise Tourangelle or the Touraine du Sud, in the area they chose to specifically cover. It's a shame, because Preuilly and its surrounds shares the same patchwork of habitats and deserves to be included this otherwise enlightened guide.
You may notice in the last of the photos that the window is very low. This has caused a problem with the kitchen design: we lose a lot of wall space and can't have a bench (or the traditional "sink in front of the window") there, so instead we will have a bookcase for all those cookery books.
We didn't buy geese, we bought tomato plants, so assuming the drought doesn't get them we could take tomatoes to the tomato fair in Douadic.
Last year I complained about the weather on 8 Mai - it rained. Tomorrow I may well complain about the weather if it doesn't rain. We have once again been promised rain, so that's every day for two weeks we have been promised rain "tomorrow".
Regular readers will recall the sorry tale of Son of Steve, the Siberian Iris, one of the very few plants from our shady London courtyard that, unaccountably, didn't cope with the move to our sunny Preuilly cour. Son of Steve was sadly consigned to the Great Compost Heap last year, reduced to a bunch of dessicated shreds.
The Brenne is an area dominated by small scale agriculture, especially fish ponds (étangs), just to the east of us. It has become a very well known destination for nature tourism. During the summer the carparks of the many birdwatching hides will be heaving with British, Dutch and French birdwatchers and their vehicles. There are many beautiful walks through woodland and along the edges of the étangs.
Birds are not the only thing to look out for in the Brenne though. There are many species of orchids, butterflies and dragonflies and more and more people who have a wider and more rounded interest in nature are coming to see what the place has to offer.
Nick and I have been working on developing a nature walk for La Maloterie, and so once a month I go over there and do an afternoon's surveying. The property is primarily small lush fields of damp improved pasture used for cutting hay in the spring and summer and grazing in the autumn and winter. It's all very low intensity, and because each field is surrounded by hedges, and native wildflowers are allowed to thrive in amongst the pasture, you can have some wonderful wildlife encounters. I am mainly surveying for insects, but Nick often sees Roe Deer and Wild Boar in the fields.
They get two species of Oil Beetle and Green Tiger Beetles - all becoming rare and declining in the UK. On our round earlier this week we saw two species of Fritillary butterfly, Scarce Swallowtails and Southern White Admiral. Like the beetles, these species either don't occur at all in Britain, or are extremely rare. Because it was a rather overcast day (it was the day it rained!) we were also treated to some fantastically close views of resting dragonflies.
I'm going to enjoy my regular visits to this peaceful and beautiful farm and hope they get lots of nature loving visitors staying there. I've created a Flickr set to show people what they might get to see.
