rubyandruch

Walnut Tree

6th Nov 2018

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The house came with a fully grown walnut tree. In south-west France, most houses of any age do. I reckon our tree was planted around the same time the house was built, which must be well on for over a 100 years ago now.

In France a walnut tree is a ‘Noix’ – quite literally a nut. As if no other nuts or nut trees existed. There’s only one, and it’s a walnut, you fools.

Ours, like all, is beautiful at all times of the year. The structure in winter showing its spread and reach, the leaves in summer oblong, pinnate and casting a welcome shadow. The branches can reach right down to the ground and we have a constant debate about whether to cut them off and raise the level (John) or leave them trailing romantically to the ground (me). We intend to hang a rope and plank and make a swing off one of them at some point in the next year.

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As Wikipedia tells us, Walnut trees are any species of tree in the plant genus Juglans, the type genus of the family Juglandaceae, the seeds of which are referred to as walnuts. All species are deciduous trees, 10–40 metres (33–131 ft) tall. It is said that they can live for a thousand years.
It is also said that nothing will grown under a walnut tree because it produces a non-toxic, colourless, chemical called hydrojuglone which is found in the leaves, stems, fruit hulls, inner bark and roots. When hydrojuglone is exposed to air or soil compounds it is oxidized into the allelochemical juglone. Juglone is highly toxic. I heard this said again on Gardener’s Question Time only a few months ago. We don’t appear to have this problem – fighting stuff back is as much as we can do.

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It might have the reputation for killing things that grow under it because it does cast such a dry and wide shade. In our garden that is very welcome, and in the summer Cedric will retrieve a cushion from the house and take it out to rest his head on in the shade of the walnut tree.

Of course, the nuts are great! I have written before about Vin de Noix and we are looking forward to sampling ours this Christmas. But walnuts just as they are are beautiful and fresh from the tree they have a buttery, milky quality that you never get with dry ones from the supermarket. We are about to parcel a load off to my GBF in the UK as he is used to getting them for Christmas.

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Monks in the middle ages widely planted the walnut for its nuts and the medicinal properties of its leaves, hence the modern name “walnut” which derives from the German “welche Nuss”, which means “foreign nut”. As a pair of ‘foreign nuts’ ourselves it is perhaps fitting that we love it so much.

Waiting for frost

28th Oct 2018

It is the end of October, the day the clocks have gone back and our gardening thoughts are pretty much filled with waiting for frost. The garden reaches a kind of autumnal peak at this time of the year

but we know of course that one frost will blacken, sap and kill, and winter will have begun.

In my experience so much of gardening is anticipation of the pleasures to come, and remembrance of the fulfilment that has been, that it takes me a conscious effort to enjoy the here and now, what is looking wonderful, the delight of eating and processing our home grown produce, and the contentment of well grown and propagated plants.

So it is with the frost, we look at weather forecasts on three different apps, compare notes with other gardeners and vignerons and get up early to see if ‘it‘ has happened overnight.

As I write, I am greenhouse-less (although one is to come this month, built out of old oak windows that we got for nothing from a person emptying their garage in anticipation of a move) so yesterday all the tender plants were moved into the house and are currently occupying every available windowsill and table. They will move out again in a couple of days because the weather apps say it will not drop below 8 degrees for the following 10 days and I always think plants are happier outside than in.

I also cut some dahlias for the house so that if it was frosty last night as promised, then at least we would have those for a week. The promised frost did not appear.

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This is the time of year when the morning sun is at its most theatrical, backlighting everything so that it looks silvered and luminous. We notice that the sun rises in a new place every morning now. Its first beam hits the garden at around the time we get up, and it comes from an apparently more northerly direction and stays low all day. Since June we’ve lost four hours of light; we’ll lose another four by December.

There is a strange sense of ‘hurry up and wait’ hanging over us. There are still chillis and aubergines in the vegetable garden, and beetroot seedlings waiting to be planted. Winter salad is coming through and celeriac and leeks are in the ground waiting to be pulled. It feels like we cannot be sure at all of how long the chillis will be with us, but on the other hand we are waiting to see if the tiny beetroots will grow. We are gamblers, with fruit and vegetables as our currency.

The birds who inhabit our garden to a far greater degree than us are urgently making the most of whatever easy food is available, fattening up for the winter. They are noisier and more visible than in the heat of summer. A robin (is it more than one?) is constantly in view and hanging around for whatever is dug up, blackbirds sing beautifully at dusk and do their ridiculous panic call for no apparent reason. A lesser spotted woodpecker visits our walnut tree and picks up walnuts and hits them impossibly quickly against the trunk to break them open. The swimming pool is covered and birds bathe in the pools of water collecting in the cover.

It has been a blisteringly hot summer and the last frost was at the end of March (not early May like the year before) and the autumn has been perfect – long and warm with honeyed light and perfect evenings in the dusk. Frost marks the moment that those days are over and the winter, which has its own joys, begins.

The controversial Vin de Noix

28th Sep 2018

We bottled our Vin de Noix today. Vin de Noix is literally ‘Walnut Wine’.

It’s controversial because we haven’t made it in the locally approved way – which is to use the young leaves of the walnut tree and Eau de Vie along with various other ‘take it with you to your grave Grand-mère’s recipe’ ingredients. When I happily announced to some locals earlier in the summer that I had started my Vin de Noix off, I was briefly interrogated as to my ‘recette’ and summarily dismissed. So anyway this is how I made it – out of a book not from my Grand-mère.

I got the recipe from Wild Food by Roger Phillips which is a source of endless intriguing things to make although to be frank last year’s Red Clover Wine was filthy stuff. Anyway I have high hopes of the Vin de Noix.

Basically you get 30 young walnuts (still green) and quarter them, put them in a big kilner jar with 5 bottles of red wine, 1 bottle of vodka, 675g of sugar, the zest of an orange, a vanilla pod and 5 cloves. Stir it all round and leave it in a cool dark place. You will get the young walnuts late June to early July so that is when you make it, so leave it until the end of September.

At the end of September, bottle it and leave it again until Christmas when it makes a lovely aperitif. If you taste it in September which we just did you might decide it needs a bit more sugar.

We got 10 small bottles. We will probably victimise our friends and relatives.and give some away.

White foxgloves

26th Sep 2018

Today I have been planting out white foxgloves in the shade of the walnut tree. Being biennials the theory is you grow new ones each year to flower the following year. The practice being you forget til it’s too late or your lovely husband lets the first lot of seedlings burn to a crisp in the ‘canicule’. No matter, a second batch was sown and has been nursed through the heat and planted out today.

I love these kind of jobs. All kinds of propagation I get a real kick out of – something about the nurturing and creating life, as well as the abundance of plants you can get for not much or no money all appeals to me.

Plus, white foxgloves, man. I love them. Here are this year’s lightening the shade. Bobby dazzlers as my darling would say.

Crab Apple Jelly

17th Sep 2018

First pick your crab apples. We have three trees all quite new – a Golden Hornet which was covered in small hard yellow apples, a Jelly King which had quite a few fruit – looking like extra small yellow and pink apples, and a Red Sentinel which has in between sized orange-y fruit.

Then spend the next three years of your life destalking them – I got a blister but in hindsight I think a pair of scissors might have been the thing.

Put ’em all in a pan and add enough water to make them float and simmer them until they turn into a mush. I found the Jelly King mush-ed up quite quickly but the Golden Hornets took a couple of hours. Keep adding water so it doesn’t stick. You want the final thing to be mush-y not water-y. Kind of a wet porridge.

Now then, necessity is the mother of invention and all that. So rig yourself up something to strain the mush through overnight. We used a bag that is supposed to be for pressing apples rigged up on a washing dryer.

In the past I have used a pillowcase, an old t-shirt and on one notable occasion actually some muslin (which is what you are supposed to do it with). The finer the cloth, the clearer the liquid that will come out of it and therefore the more sparkly and clear the final jelly. But you get a lot less liquid through with a finer cloth. So it’s a trade off between aesthetics and volume in which generally in my life volume always wins.

Leave it for about 24 hours to drip drip drip into your receptacle.

Rescue the liquid, and add some sugar. The amount of sugar depends on the amount of liquid but more or less the same weight. I used jam sugar but there’s a lot of pectin in crab apples so you probably don’t need it and ordinary sugar perhaps with the juice of a lemon would be fine. I had a litre of liquid and used about 750g of sugar.

Boil it up until it reaches a good ‘rolling boil’ and test it will set by dabbing a bit on a saucer and waiting to see if it stays liquid or not.

Sterilised jars – I got three and a bit over.

Lovely stuff with cold meats, pork, in sauces or just on toast or crumpets.

Tintinhull

3rd Sep 2018

we visited Tintinhull today. I’ve wanted to see it for many years, having read Penelope Hobhouse extensively and seen her using it as her laboratory. Obviously the house and setting is beautiful and the bones of the garden set out by Mrs Reiss are there and wonderful.

31210751-1B38-42DD-BC25-61D343099454 In fact, although the planting is lovely, particularly the pots, it is the symmetrical and straight-lined elegance of the layout that inspires the most. Every line is meticulously planned, every line of sight ends in something pleasing and hedges and walls divide the space up into elegantly proportioned spaces. It’s harmonious, that’s what.

I think the planting, although there’s lots to covet and admire is a bit old fashioned, but the pots are really lovely and have made me resolve to ‘do better’ next year. My pots are boring monoculture I realise.

C5C89236-5EAD-4B08-9FC7-0FC158283886 They also had LOTS of scented leaf pelargoniums, which I love and never grow enough of, and besides I lost a load in last year’s greenhouse debacle, so more of those too.

Abstracts

29th Aug 2018

Early on in our relationship, I mentioned to John that I collected ceramics. “Oh yes” he said “who do you collect?”. “David Leach” I said, thinking ‘he will never have heard of him’. “Ah yes” said John “son of Bernard, Lowerdown Pottery”.

In retrospect that might have been the moment I decided to marry him.

We still do have a small collection of ceramics – John loves John Maltby, and I still love David Leach’s work, and we have collected others as we go. Here’s a Leach that we have – absolutely wonderful.

Of course if we had endless resources, then we would be buying Hans Coper, Lucy Rie and Hamada. When we win the lottery, eh?

Aaany way, what this collection and admiration sparked within me was a need for me to create some of my own and to understand the processes. I enrolled in an evening class in the UK while I did my contract work, which was brilliant for me and which sadly is no longer supported as Adult Learning, and started creating.

Of course, now back in France, I am in the process of setting up a studio and building my equipment and resources as well as learning on the job. I am very lucky that a new neighbour has recently moved in who has taught Ceramics (hi Karen!) and is helping me on my way. You could spend a lifetime learning only about glazes and surfaces and still only have learned a small fraction of what is needed.

Some of my first work has been abstract – a ‘form’ – as I have learned to call it ( a bit pretentious) but it is such an interesting thing to do – making an abstract. In other words making a physical form (there i go) which does not represent anything. It’s hard – the minute it starts looking like something you have to think about how to make it not look like anything. And then for this one which I thought was abstract, the first thing most people say is ‘is it a boat?’. Anyway this one is an abstract form, in stoneware, with manganese oxide and a dolomite glaze. It’s going in the gravel garden on a plinth. I confidently expect the hornets to build a nest in it.

Peach and Raspberry Jam

28th Aug 2018

Quick recipe. Made a second batch of this today. Reminds me of

I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

TS Eliot.

Get about a kilo of very ripe peaches. Plunge them into boiling water for about a couple of minutes and then into cold. The skin should just rub off. Try not to think about eyeballs.

Chop into pieces and put in a pan. Add the best part of a kilo of jam sugar. And as many raspberries as you can pick but somewhere between 500g and 700g if poss.

Boil it up and let it boil furiously but not so furiously that it boils over and you spend the next week cleaning burnt sugar off your aga.

Put into sterilised jam jars.

Absolutely yummy.

Planting

23rd Aug 2018

When I think about the kind of planting I like to see and the kind I want in my garden, I realise I am more drawn to airy, translucent, tall and diaphanous planting than any other kind. I want plants that will move with the wind, reveal what is behind and around them and also half screen the view beyond. I want prettiness, dynamism and interest.

That dictates plant choices and of course we have a lot of verbena bonariensis – which can take over and become dense and which has to be pulled out in great handfuls to maintain lightness and transparency – a constant task. Also a lot of bronze fennel (other umbellifers such as carrots and cow parsley (including the black one), seeds itself everywhere and has to be pulled out and either binned, given away or relocated, but it has such wonderful feathers which combine into darkness below and tall ochre covered flat plates of flowers above that it cannot be resisted.

Slightly more unusually verbena officinalis Bampton, easily grown from seed, has rather wonderful bronzey purple stems dotted with little pink flowers that form a gauze-y effect – here through echninacea.

At a higher level I tend to choose trees and shrubs that will have the same effect – this Eucalyptus, which I bought in France and I think is Azura – a French variety – is slow growing with a wonderful silvery blue foliage which shimmers in the sunlight and breeze. On the right of this photo. Olives of which I have two and more to come are equally beautiful in a similar way.

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I have found a peach tree (here on the left) to offer just the kind of foliage and effect that I am looking for. And I love the Indigofera which genuinely flowers all summer in a light and airy way.

I particularly dislike the kind of unexciting and dense planting that has blocks of colour running into each other often seen nowadays in so called ‘prairie planting’ – so I am trying to create a small ‘hot prairie’ (it gets up to 40 degrees here, when it is windy the plants must feel like someone is holding a hair dryer to them) which has the same airy and transparent feel to it. Nepeta, curry plant and salvia turkestanica are both holding up well to the conditions, with Cephalaria Gigantea, Digitalis Ferruginea and various types of Molinia to come.

Which brings me to grasses. Big yawn for those monocultures of bold upright grasses (Calamagrostis I am talking to you), or feather grass. The gardening equivalent of a beige cardigan. BUT some grasses have exactly the type of airy wavy translucence that I am looking for – stipa gigantea (common but beautiful), all the Molinias. Yes I am growing them.