Invaders

Ivy (lierre in French) growing on a wall and on a well... the well is our community well. Residents of the hamlet are welcome to take water from it, but nobody does any more. It dates back to the days when there was no piped-in water here. Apparently, the well is very deep.

The plant with yellow flowers above and below is a variety of St. John's wort, called mille-pertuis in French. It is invasive and has really spread over the 22 years we've lived here. The Wikipedia article about it says it is widely considered to be a noxious weed and is called goatweed in various places. It is in the Hypericum genus and grows worldwide. The flowers are pretty. A wild variety with smaller flowers grows out in the vineyard.

A bowl of cherries

It looks like we might get at least one bowl of cherries off our neighbor's trees this summer. The neighbor in question lives in Britanny, and she comes to Saint-Aignan infrequently these days.

This neighbor's mother lived here, and she herself might have grown up here. Her mother passed away a decade ago. For a while, the neighbor and her partner came here from Brittany and mowed the tall grass in her small orchard, which is adjacent to our yard on the north side. In early autumn, they would come pick fruit, but that stopped years ago too. The last time I saw the neighbor was three or four years ago, and she was alone. She's had other people come and do the annual springtime mowing in the orchard for years now. Nobody picks the fruit, as far as I can tell.

Like other part-time neighbors, she told us when we first met her that we should harvest as much fruit from her trees (cherries, plums, apples, and quinces) as we want. She said she'd rather we pick the fruit — not strangers. So when the cherries finish ripening, I'll go pick some — if the birds don't beat me to them. I might save a few pits and see if I can get them to sprout. Then we could have a cherry tree in our yard.

I won't be picking any grapes (above left). They are red wine grapes, and the vineyard parcel is right next to the little orchard. Above right is a pretty plant that grows in another neighbor's hedge. Nice colors.

Yard work: thwarting blackberry vines

Here are some of the the results of some of the fun I've been having recently. I have to lean into the hedge and try to cut the stems of blackberry plants that are growing in there as close to ground level as I can get.I have to be careful that the thorns on the vines and stems don't grab onto my clothes, or worse, my skin. I've been doing this job for more than 20 years now, and I can't seem to make a lot of progress.

These are not pretty pictures, but they are real. I still have a lot of pruning to do. We have just over 100 meters of hedge along three sides of our yard, and then we have another 70 meters of fencing along the fourth side. Blackberry vines are trying to take that side over too. For information, 170 meters equals about 560 feet. And by the way, the high temperature this afternoon is supposed to be about 80F, and tomorrow it's predicted to hit 90F.

Our yard...

...also known as le jardin or "the garden" — it all depends on where you come from.

On the left above is s a view of one-third of the yard that you get from our guest bedroom. The grass is very brown for this early in the season. On the right is another third of the yard. This part of the yard had, until recently, several large trees planted on it — two tall conifers, and three birch trees. All of those died for some unknown reason over the past five years. There was also a small pear tree out there that died, and there was a big juniper bush that we had taken out. The north side of our house is visible on the right in the photo.

On the left above is another view of the north side yard, and in the foreground you can see the stump of one of the conifers that had to be cut down. On the right is a view of the western parts of the yard, taken from near the back gate. Those are apple trees on the left in the photo

The garden shed is out near the back gate. We've accepted a bid from a contractor to come and put new shutters of the shed's window and to repair its door, which needs new hinges. We've been waiting for the work to start for a while now. On the right above you can see that we are still struggling against moles that are burrowing under our two apple trees. If the weather stays dry, they will soon move on. The un-mowed patch is where we grow oregano, which we will soon be harvesting and drying.

Our hamlet, house, and yard

I did a lot of pruning in the hedge on on the west side of our land yesterday afternoon. The weather was perfect for it. I cut back a lot of ronces (blackberries, brambles), some ivy, and other invasive plants. I didn't take any pictures. Maybe today. But first I have to go to the pharmacy and the supermarket. I think it's going to take all summer for us to get the yard back under control.

Bad weather has everything to do with the situation we find ourselves in. Too much rain for a year or longer caused all the invasive plants to grow like crazy. And it kept us inside, not outside trimming and grooming the yard and hedges. I also had cataract operations last year in June and in October. During the recovery time after those operations I was incapacitated for two or three months — no dirty jobs like gardening or yard work allowed. My advancing age doesn't help, either.

Above is an aerial view of our "hamlet" or hameau, which locally is sometimes called un village. In American terms, it's actually a neighborhood in a small town (or village) that has a population of about 1,200. As the crow files, we are about half a mile from the Cher river and less than two miles from the Château de Saint-Aignan.

That's our house and yard that you see in the oval I've drawn on the aerial photo. We have half an acre of land (2,300 m²). In our hamlet there are nine houses, eight of which are visible in the photo. Five of the nine houses are lived in year-round. One is an AirBnB gîte and three are résidences secondaires (vacation houses). There are no businesses and there's no church. In official jargon, the difference between a village and a hameau is that the former includes a church and the latter doesn't.

More of the same

Nothing to report on the missing cat, Ulia... Here I give you just a few more photos of flowers. These grow in our yard. Today is supposed to be cloudy but not windy or cold. It will be a good day for getting some more yard work done. Blackberry brambles need to be tackled. They are trying to take over. Blackberry vines (ronces), ivy (lierre), saint John's wort (mille-pertuis), and honeysuckle (chèvrefeuille) are my sworn enemies right now. And I'm still slowly working on emptying out the greenhouse.

Chacun cherche son chat

That's a French movie title. Everybody's looking for their lost cat. The French title is not easy to translate into English, or to pronounce. I'm sure that's why the film was titled "When the Cat's Away..." when it was released outside of France in the 1990s. Maybe you've seen it. I haven't but I'm going to try to find it on the internet.

Anyway, a few days ago, we found the note above in our mailbox. Neighbors of ours who we hadn't met before had left it in mailboxes along the road to alert the neighborhood to keep an eye out for their runaway cat Ulia. Then, yesterday morning I was out walking Tasha when I rounded a corner over in our neighbors' yard and there she was. Ulia, I mean. Tasha was a little way behind me at that point. She never even saw the cat, as far as I know.

By the time Tasha caught up with me, the cat had skedaddled. She headed toward the woods on the south side of our neighbors' properties. Then I remembered the note from the people looking for her.

When I got back home, I called the number on the notice. I told where we lived and told them I had seen their cat. Not 10 minutes later, a car came up the hill and parked by the pond out behind our house. Two people got out, and they had a cat carrier with them. I called them on their mobile phone and told them I would be glad to show them exactly where I had seen the cat. We walked around the neighbors' yard together. As I headed back home they continued their search.

We saw them several times over the course of the day. They told me they would let me know if they found Ulia, and they asked me to keep an eye out for her on my walks around the hamlet. They said they had been looking for the cat since last Monday. That's all the news for now.

A few days ago we had a rainy night. I took these pictures in our neighbors' flower garden the next morning. At first I didn't want to believe they were peonies. They're so different from the ones we have in our back yard.

Is this what is called a "tree peony" (pivoine arbustive in French)?

Remember the events called "be-ins"?

I mentioned in a comment to Travel David yesterday that I had taken the Citroën on a nice drive out in the beautiful Touraine countryside. I wanted to test out the car's new radio by listening to some 1970s Linda Ronstadt songs. One album I played was Don't Cry Now, released in 1973. I had copied MP3 files of the songs that I have in iTunes onto an SD card. The radio's MP3 player worked great.

The first time I ever heard Linda Ronstadt sing live and in person was in the spring of 1969. Anyway, the venue was the Sarah P. Duke gardens at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where I was an undergraduate student. It was a warm, sunny April afternoon. The concert turned into what was called a "be-in" that day. Do you remember those? It was all very counter-cultural. People took off their clothes and swam around in a pond (or was it a fountain?) in the garden while Linda and the Stone Poneys performed.

Years later, when Walt and I were living in Washington DC, we went to a Ronstadt concert in a big indoor stadium out in Maryland somewhere. I remember that Linda was singing Blue Bayou then, among other songs. That must have been in the early 1980s. A year or two later we learned that Ronstadt was going to do a performance of old ballads that were on her What's New album, recorded with arranger/composer Nelson Riddle. The venue was Radio City Music Hall. We immediately bought tickets and went to spend a weekend in New York City and really enjoyed the concert. I remember that Linda's encore that night was her hit song Desperado, that had been written, composed, and recorded by The Eagles.

Skip forward to the year 2000. One annual event in San Francisco in those days was a set of performances by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the Canadian sisters who recorded a lot of French-language as well as English-language songs. I had first heard them on the radio in Paris years earlier, when they released the songs La Complainte pour Sainte-Catherine and Entre Lajeunesse et la Sagesse. We went to a McGarrigles concert in a small theater at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco that year, and Kate McGarrigle (mother of Rufus Wainright) announced that as an encore she and her sister had asked Linda Ronstadt, a San Francisco resident, to perform one of their most famous songs, Heart Like a Wheel, which had been a major hit for Ronstadt earlier. She was in the audience that night. And there she was, sitting in the row right behind us. We hadn't realized she was there. We didn't speak to her, though I wish I could have.

One other performance by Ronstadt that we were happy to get tickets for took place at the Warfield theater in San Francisco that also featured the singer/songwriter Emmylou Harris. Harris had worked with Ronstadt and the McGarrigles for years, and we were big fans.

I was very sad when I learned a few years ago that Linda Ronstadt had ended her singing career for health reasons.

9,000 tracks

I'm having a new car radio installed in my Citroën C4 this week. The old radio included a CD player, but I don't ever play CDs any more. If anybody wants any music CDs, I have a box of about 500 of them in a closet upstairs. I don't know what to do with them. About half of them are American or British, and the others are French. When we got iTunes for Windows years ago, I decided to convert all the songs that we had on CDs to MP3 format and put them all on a hard disks. Here's a link to a 2012 post about that process. We've never looked back.

Don't worry, I have copies of all that music on several different hard disks and on several different computers, so I don't worry too much about losing anything if a disk or a computer crashes. The radio I'm having installed in the Citroën will play songs that I copy to SD cards or micro SD cards. It will also connect to BlueTooth devices — tablets or smart phones. I really enjoy playing music in the car when I'm out running errands.

In San Francisco, where for a few years I had a 100-mile commute to work and back, I played a lot of French music when I was on the road mornings and evenings. Now I find I play a lot more American music. I hear French all the time, so it's nice to hear songs in English whenever I get a chance. I have so many memories attached to both French and English music. I'm completely out of touch with the current music scenes in the U.S. and in France, but that doesn't matter to me any more.

P.S. Sorry, no pictures today.

A Mexican "lasagna" with pulled pork and enchilada sauce

This is a kind of lasagna but is made with enchilada sauce (home made or store-bought). The meat is slow-cooked pork that I shredded using two forks and my fingers (after it had cooled down). I added the enchilada sauce to the meat along with chopped onion, black beans, bell peppers, and sweet corn. Then I let the mixture cook on the stove at on low heat for an hour or more, tasting it periodically to make sure the meet was nice and tender. Layer tortillas with the meat mixture and grated cheese in a baking dish, finishing with a layer of meat sauce and a layer of the cheese. Bake it in the oven until all the grated cheese has had time to melt. Cut wedges of the "enchilada-lasagna" as you would cut a pie. Serve it with salsa and guacomole with cilantro.

May: flower portraits, 2005-2025

Out taking pictures early in the morning

It's easier said than done when you consider that the sun rises at 6:15 here right now and is very low on the horizon when I go out. Trying to take a picture means having the sun right in your face or reflected on the smart phone's display.

Here are some photos that worked, more or less. The artichokes above are in our back yard. I'm not sure I know when they are ripe, but I think I'll harvest some of them and see if they're edible. The tiny grapes on the vines are out in the vineyard, of course. The white flowers of a locust tree on the edge of the vineyard have started to fade.

Below are some photos of the work that's going on out in the vineyard these days and that I mentioned yesterday. A lot of vines have been dug up and now the ground they were growing in has been plowed. We're wondering if new vines will be planted later this year or in springtime next year.