The garden flowers and other occupants

We have been enjoying an exceptionally warm period here and it has coincided with the first flush of our Wisteria. The white Wisteria is exceptionally perfumed so we felt really lucky to be able to take our coffee and lunches outside while enjoying the intoxicating perfume.

The Wisteria here grows rampant and has to be cut back several times a year. The roots of the purple Wisteria get into the border and I have to cut back long shoots that run for metres and I only discover them in the autumn as things die back.

The Hellebore also were magnificent this year with long flower stalks supporting multi flower heads, I think the months of rain suited them very well. There was so much growth that I had to cut off the finished flowers, filling four barrow loads of spent flower heads from just the front garden.

Everthing comes at a cost in the garden.

This was the first year we had seen the Azara dentata flower so plentifully. It was planted in 2021 as was the flowering Ash behind it.

I planted it, and the flowering Ash in 2021 after reading “The Creation of a Garden”. Nothing like a good gardening book to inspire and give ideas for different plants. The Azara provides masses of pollen as can be attested from the pollen basket of the honeybee in the photo above.

Another feature of the garden at this time is the Cerinthe major. It self seeds now. I have gathered seed in the past but it is difficult as the ripe seed drops off and the almost ripe keeps hold of the seed coat but it will still germinate.

The flowers are full of bumble bees and Anthophora – the furry little gray bees here (in the U.K. they are black).

Our quince tree has been flowering. The pale pink flowers are so perfect against the soft green leaves. The fruit, much as I treasure it, is always attacked and we can only salvage the unblemished parts to use.

Our first poppy in the garden grew on the wall! You cannot but admire the tenacity of a plant that can flourish in such a poor environment. Our other self seeded poppies in the ground have yet to flower.

The hoopoes are summer visitors and a pair come every evening to forage in the front garden.

We do not see many Goldfinches at this time of year. This one looks as if he was coming to check out if we had any flowers seeding at the moment but he had to leave with an empty beak. We will see more of them in the autumn.

Some of our favourite garden residents are the marbled newts (Triturus marmoratus) they are such gentle creatures. These ones were resting contentedly under the rotting leg of our garden bench. The two legs had been made of cut wood from the garden and they had to be replaced to support the bench. I suppose the rotting wood provided a pleasant extra heat source. There were four of them curled up together although the photograph only shows three. We often find several curled up together.

We have never seen them in the house, it is probably too dry for them.

The local whip snakes do, on occasion, come into the house. They soon disappear if they see you or hear your footsteps. Their proper name is Hierophis viridiflavus and they are quite harmless. We often find their cast skins around the garden and outbuildings.

This one made a quick exit out the door, round the corner and into a hole in the wall near the base of our rose Mme Isaac Pereire. Once safe it can never resist a parting hiss as if to say “You did not frighten me one bit!”

The rose provides good shelter for the comings and goings of the snake, largely unseen by us.

Rain, storms and more rain

At least our Liriodendron is still standing, its golden leaves making sure that we understand that autumn is well and truly here.

We were more fortunate than many not to have lost any trees to the storm Domingos. We did lose electicity on the Saturday night of the storm but it was restored by Sunday at lunch time. Morning tea was made on the camping gas stove, so I had all that was necessary.

The saffron harvest was much poorer this year. There was no rain for the bulbs as they tried to push through and then they were inondated with rain just after they started to flower. This bumble managed to nip in during a clear moment.

It was nice to see the Ivy bees (Colletes hederae) taking advantage of the nectar and pollen.

The butternuts and pumpkins were very successful this year allowing us to give to the friends who were not so successful. I enjoy them as vegetables and they keep very well which takes away the stress of having to quickly use gluts from the vegetable garden. I must admit though that we rarely have gluts, as we keep only a small vegetable garden, but we are often the recipients of other peoples generous donations from their potagers.

The tomatoes were also very successful so I have plenty of puree stored in the freezer. The vegetable garden has been put to bed now.

We dug up this root vegetable that we had given a second chance to from last year. It is called Poire de Terre (not Pomme de Terre!).

Not an inspiring harvest. I found the roots insipid. Yet again I tell myself – keep it simple. I manage butternuts, tomatoes and herbs. I must concentrate on what grows well in the garden.

We often find marbled newts in the damper parts of the garden. This marbled newt (Triturus marmoratus) was getting happily settled under the Poire de Terre when Kourosh dug it out. They are very gentle creatures. We noticed this one was extremely fat which I put down to the rain and abundance of earthworms as they are egg laying and breed in the spring.

This year has been a year of extremes. Extreme heat, extreme dryness, floods of rain and also – an unprecedented heavy attack on the bees by the asiatic hornet Vespa velutina.

We have installed “muzzles” in front of the hives in an attemt to protect the bees. They do not work. The bees get picked off the muzzles by the large number of hornets as they slow down to enter the hive. The muzzles do keep the frelons at a distance and we feel that it is less stress on the hive. The predation is very high and as it continues right until the present – nearly mid November – we wonder if there will be enough bees left in the hive to form a viable colony that could survive over winter.

The British beekeeping magasine “BeeCraft” has reported that there has been a confirmed sighting of Vespa velutina in Savannah, Georgia, USA and a nest was found. The only hope of control, in my opinion, is for sufficient money to be found for researchers to find a natural pheremone that can be manufactured to attract the females for destruction.

On a happier note, we are entertained between the downpours by the occasional butterfly on the buddleia that overhangs from the neighbours garden.

We have a little warbler that we can watch from the patio windows. It never used to come into the front garden.

It is becoming more at home but I am not sure what attracts it to the patio.

The robin was our first visitor and views the other birds as outsiders, to be tolerated with difficulty.

Is it autumn?

The trees are starting to have brown leaves.

Some of the leaves are starting to fall.

The new little Tetradium daniellii, tree which flowered for the first time last year, has not flowered this year and its leaves are turning yellow.

Luckily, I have another established Tetradium and my new little tree turned out to be a female and the flowers produced seeds. I planted them last December, just to see what would happen and now I have a little seedling!

The Caryopteris in the front garden is still flowering well and attracting the bees. Last year we cut it back after it had flowered so there was a considerable number of cuttings. I don’t know if it was the correct timing but Kourosh put six cuttings in a pot and they all took!

We put the cuttings in various places in the garden to bide their time until finding permanent homes and now they are flowering! That is quite a success story, so it must be an easy plant to take cuttings from, so if you have some in your garden…

The cosmos add so much colour to the front garden at this time of year.

The cosmos make great landing spots for all types of bees.

They are also a good source of pollen.

This year I noticed the honeybees on the sedum before it was completely opened.

I associate sedum more with bumblebees and butterflies but this year has been different, perhaps because we had such a dry August.

This year we had less summer honey than last year. Now we are treating the bees against the varroa mite with thymol which is a natural extract of thyme oil. It has a strong smell and the bees do not like it but Violette makes the most fuss.

It was quite hot on Monday so Kourosh supplied her with a parasol but she was still unhappy. As long as it makes her scratch the horrible mites off, then it will be worth it.

This week white cosmos have started to flower everywhere in the garden. As they are mainly self-seeded I do not understand why the white coloured cosmos have flowered later than the pink/lilac ones.

A new season is coming but it is reassuring to find a baby marbled newt (Triturus marmoratus) in the garden. Everything has been so strange and disturbed this year that it is good to see that these newts have continued to breed in the garden.

There is more in the garden than flowers…

Our hose drips where it is attached to the outside tap and the corner stays damp so that underneath it was very overgrown and needed a good spring weeding.  However, more than the plants had appreciated the dampness and a large common toad (Bufo bufo) had made the corner his home and even constructed a comfortable tunnel under a large stone.

He did not object to being handled and posed peacefully for a close-up shot.  It makes me wonder how often he has done this for us.  My husband likes the toads and I think they are now trained to come to hand when he discovers one.

Beside the toad was a marbled newt ( Triturus marmoratus) who was also enjoying the damp spot.  We often see the newts in the garden or in the old well.

Next to appear were much younger newts and for the first time I saw one (the one on the left) that still had its crest.  The males have a crest during the aquatic stage but this will gradually disappear as they proceed into the terrestrial stage and begin to become more coloured.

The other day I needed a stepping stone to use to get through the border to my bee hotel so I looked for a suitable one at the bottom of the garden.  When the stone was lifted there were two young snakes curled up together underneath it but they soon made off.  The above photograph is a set-up.  The stone was replaced and lifted again the next day but this time only one of the snakes was underneath it.   The snake is a juvenile Western whip snake, (Hierophis viridiflavus), they are quite common around here but are non-venomous and not aggressive.  We have lots of wall lizards and these provide an easy food source for the snakes.

My bee orchid is still doing well and I was quite excited when I thought another orchid might be growing in the garden.

First a shoot like an asparagus appeared.

Then the bud started to open.

I thought the flowerlets looked like orchids.  Wrong!  There are similarities but there is no central single lip which is a common feature of orchids.  This is a new plant to me – it is an Orobanche amythystea.  These are not orchids but plants that do not produce chlorophyll and obtain their nutrition by parasitising other plants.  Orobanche amythystea can use various plants as a substrate including wild carrot, sea holly and ivy.  I do hope mine is a parasite of my ivy!  I cannot see where the roots of the Orobache are reaching under the soil but I’d like to think it is joining me in my never ending battle with invading ivy.

The flowers will eventually form seeds but these seeds will be unable to germinate unless they find themselves near roots of their host.  There are many different species and they can become problematic if the host plant is an arable crop.  In France some of the other species can infect tobacco and legumes.

Yesterday morning, just after 10 o’clock my husband called me to see the bee he had spotted asleep on a Hydrangea bud.  It was an Anthophora plumipes male.  They are extremely fast moving bees so it was fun to snap some shots of him while he was fast asleep and motionless.

Flowers and trees make up the backbone of a garden but it is all the unplanned arrivals, plant and animal, that make gardens so special.