Cedrus deodara

Above is the tall Himalayan cedar Cedrus deodara tree that still stands in our yard. I just measured it and it is about 22 meters tall — that's about 75 feet. We can see it from the other side of the Cher River, about two miles distant.

Below is a short video of the felling of the trunk of sapin bleu (blue spruce) tree that we had cut down the other day. It was about 11 meters tall, so about half the size of the cedar. The house shook when that tall, heavy trunk hit the ground. The stump is 2 feet in diameter at ground level.

Focusing on details

While Walt was in Albany, I was walking Tasha the Sheltie twice a day. We had the full range of local weather over the course of the week he was gone, including high winds, heavy rains, sunny spells, and just gray days. All that was missing was some snow and ice, but it hasn't been that kind of winter so far. A recent news report said that January 2020, for example, was the warmest January ever recorded in France. I think the same will be true of February.

I mostly walk out into the Renaudière vineyard when I go out with the dog. There are other paths in the ares that I could follow, but some of them are too muddy right now. One advantage of walking in the vineyard is that we very seldom see a car, another person, or another dog out there. There are a lot of rocks, however — this is rocky ground compared to the land down in the river valley, half a mile away, which is mostly sand. Some rocks I can't resist picking up and taking home. The white one in the photo above has to be chalk, and I believe I can see some seashells embedded in it. They say that prehistorically this area was seabed. You can zoom in on the images here by clicking on them a couple of times.

Last fall, while I was on my most recent trip to America, the biggest apple tree in our back yard split in half and fell to the ground. It wasn't a surprise, because it had lost several big limbs over the past five or six years. We had a landscaping crew come and cut up the wood, which we kept for firewood. Here's what the stump looks like. It's hollow, and it had a lot of ants and other insects living in it. The stump was cut off at ground level, and it will eventually finish rotting a way. Maybe it's a good candidate for the rock salt treatment. Our friends and part-time neighbors who live in Blois told me that a linden ("lime") tree in their back yard suffered a similar fate back in November. It broke in half and they saw that the trunk had been hollowed out by insects or fungus or whatever.

I'm glowing kale out in the vegetable garden. It's the Red Russian kale variety, also called Siberian kale — even though it is most likely native to the eastern Mediterranean region and Asia Minor. Kale is a loose-leaf cabbage as opposed to cabbages that form a hard head as they grow, and greens like kale and collard greens tolerate freezing temperatures so can be grown over the winter in our climate. They don't really like dry, hot weather, so I wasn't sure these plants would survive the June-to-October drought we lived through in 2109. But they did. I like the color of this variety's leaves. And they're tender and tasty too.

Here's another example of a tree — an apple tree — that has succumbed either to disease or to extreme weather conditions, including long dry spells like last summer's, or prolonged rainy periods like the weather we've had since October 2019. It's hard to believe it was drought that killed this tree, because it grows within a few feet of a pond that has never gone dry since we've lived here. Its roots have to have been well watered. The tree used to produce little green apples that were sweet and crunchy. The man who owns the vineyard once told me that he considered them to be the best apples out of the dozen or more varieties that grew around the vineyard. Now the tree stands dead — even the mistletoe that grew in the tree has died now — and one limb after another falls to the ground as winter windstorms blow through the area.

As I just wrote, it has been exceedingly rainy here for five months now, and the recent weeks have been no exception. Rain or shine, the dog needs a walk, so out we go. Sometimes the walks aren't very long, and that was especially true over the week when I was going out twice a day. Rain like the rain making these ronds dans l'eau on the vineyard road is not hard enough to discourage Tasha, or me. The vineyard road is full of pot holes and puddles, but it's made of gravel so not too muddy. This morning a hard rain is falling — it started sometime right after midnight.

This is the view facing west as we walk out on the vineyard road at sunset. The gravel road is nearly a mile long from its starting point near our back gate, ending out where it intersects the next paved road. That one is marked on maps and by signs as a pretty road through the local vineyards for tourists driving, biking, or hiking through the area. At least some of the grapes grown here go into wines that carry the Touraine-Chenonceaux label of quality.

Avant et après

Here are two photos showing what the view from the back gate looked like on Feb. 12 and then what it looks like now. The first photo is the one I posted a couple of days ago with the tree names added on as labels. I think the trees look much less crowded together with the sickly sapin bleu gone.

And here are two more photos, one before and one after, taken from farther away. In these, you can see how much taller the deodar cedar (a.k.a. Himalayan cedar) on the left is than the fir tree that I call "the Christmas tree" on the right. I'm pretty sure the woman we bought the house from said that was a live Christmas tree her family had in the house one year. They planted it in the back yard when the holidays were over.

As you've no doubt noticed, I never get tired of taking pictures of our house and hamlet from out in the vineyard, and thinking how lucky we were to find this house 17 years ago. See below. Our house is the tallest one, and the one with the brownest roof, in the photo.

As for the stump of the felled tree, here's how it was left. We can live with it. After a few years, it will have rotted away. It would have cost a lot more money to have the stump dug out, and would have left a big mess in the yard.

The violent and destructive storm that is supposed to hit the U.K. today seems to be going mostly north of us living here in the Loire Valley. Saint-Aignan is 300 miles south of London as the crow flies. We are supposed to have gusty winds during the day today, but nothing extreme. And we're supposed to get some rain overnight and into Monday morning. We don't need the rain but we don't get to choose, right?

Three dogs, one vineyard

Over the nearly 17 years we've lived here on the edge of a vineyard near the town of Saint-Aignan, in the Loire Valley region, we've had three dogs. The one living with us now is Natasha — we call her Tasha. She's a pure-bred Shetland sheepdog. She'll be three years old next week. I was going to post six photos of Tasha this morning, but then I happened upon old photos of her predecessors.

The dog before Tasha was named Callie. She was a pure-bred border collie. Compared to Tasha, Callie was pretty neurotic. The would go crazy barking at the moon, for example, or chasing the beam of a flashlight. She hated riding in the car. Tasha loves riding in the car, and she doesn't even notice the moon or flashlights. Callie lived for just 10 years. She died less than two months after we brought Tasha home in 2017. That was sad.

The first dog that lived in France with us was Collette. She was a "rescue dog" that we found at the Santa Clara County Humane Society shelter in California. We took her home in 1992 and she lived to be 14, passing away in 2006  after a severe stroke paralyzed her on one side. We made an appointment to have her euthanized, but according to the vet she died before the drug could be administered. Collette also loved riding in the car, so it was appropriate for her to die on the back seat of the Peugeot.

Collette was never crate-trained, but when we left California in 2003 we bought a kennel for her to travel in. Walt had a Jeep, so there was room for it in the back. We put it in there and she started sleeping in it during our week-long drive across the U.S. to go spend some time in North Carolina while waiting for our French visas to be granted. Then she traveled in it on an airplane to France. She wasn't fazed and she loved being here in France — I'm happy she had three good years in the vineyard after more than 10 years as a city dog.

Callie hated the car, and it was probably my fault. When we went to get her from a breeder three hours from Saint-Aignan in 2007, she was 10 weeks old. I decided to drive back home on little curvy roads, and Callie got very carsick. That did it, I think. She was in good health but died young after an injury paralyzed her hind legs and her tail — she couldn't walk or wag. There was no solution but to have her put down.

We hope to have Tasha a lot longer than we had Callie. She's a very barky dog, but her barking is not constant. She's just vocal when she gets excited. She was really happy, of course, when Walt got home yesterday from his one-week trip to Albany NY. I took her with me in the car to go pick him up at the Tours TGV train station (an hour's drive each way).

I enjoyed taking all these photos (from 2004, 2010, and 2020) and I've enjoyed looking at them this morning. It's surprising to me to see the high quality of photos from 2004, when I had a Canon digital camera. The 2010 photos are ones I took with a Panasonic camera. Tasha's photos are Sony camera images.