villarcoin.com – A Woodland Garden in France

The race has been on against the bad weather to try to get as much wood into the barn as possible. It needs to dry for next winter and if the start of this one is anything to go by, the wood will be much needed! The first field has now been cleared, but the stocks of cut wood I’ve cut have to be moved into the dry. Thankfully yet again R & S have come to my aid, and we spent an exhausting couple of hours in near darkness and swirling snow loading the wood into their tractor’s big trailer and tugging it to the barn where we chucked the entire contents into a huge heap in the doorway. 

Then it was my job to move the pile and to stack it against the wall. With odd bits of help from neighbour Valentine the job is now mainly done. I can get the car into under cover and there’s not too much wood left to stack. I have had to leave some massive sections of tree trunk on the terrain, but these will have to wait for my next trip out in January. I’ll shortly be leaving for the journey back to the UK and can only hope there’s a break in this very wintry weather. They say there might be a thaw in the coming day or two – I hope so because I have several bags of daffodils to plant out and I’d like to get some of them in the ground before I go. I finish this entry with a visitor, the village and the garden in the snow. 

Lucky 2002 - 2010

How strange it is that the first post on this blog featured my dog Lucky enjoying a walk in the woods just over the road. At that time I had no idea that we would shortly be embarking on a woodland garden, and that she would oversee so much of the initial clearing of the ground. It was her habit to take a safe vantage point and make a collection of chewable sticks to amuse herself, occasionally ambling down to the stream, the ‘rigole’ at the bottom of the incline. There she would lie in the small pool I’d made, take a drink and emerge dripping into the warm sunshine.

It transpired alas, that my poor Lucky was to be the very first ‘planting’ on our new ground. Struck down with kidney failure, she was put to sleep at home in France, last Monday, November 22nd 2010. I buried her in a grave I’d made at the top of the slope, where she would often lie watching my gardening antics with a bemused and indulgent air. It’s far too painful for me to write much more, and this is of course a garden blog. However, in memory of her I want to make sure that this little piece of France which in a sense belonged to both of us is as welcoming and protective of nature and wildlife as I can manage. In lending her to me for eight short years nature gave me a wonderfully loving and affectionate creature full of loyalty and character, fun and adventure. I miss her so much, it’s the least I can do to honour her memory in this way. It may be sentimental but I have no shame about that, nor about the tears I have shed for her.

Lucky is buried at the top of the slope right next to an enormous stone which is what I will always think of as the Lucky Stone. My second planting in the garden will be of  daffodils brought from Scotland and these will bring joy and colour around her grave each spring.

Lucky - Younger Days in Perthshire

Thanks Lucky: RIP 22.11.2010 with love from your Dad and from your many friends.

Before I can even begin to design the garden, I think I need to make a list of the features of the terrain. In that way I can respect what’s there, so that at least any changes I make should be deliberate and carefully thought out. A number of positives come quickly to mind:-

• The slope on some of the land.
• The flatness of the top part of plot 58 (suitable for some rows or squares of vegetables.)
• Some natural outcrops of rocks (or massive granite stones).
• A stream – running all year.
• Lots of trees, some massive, some saplings and some collapsed and dead.
• Apparently fertile (and, I think, quite sandy) soil.
• A low stone wall marks out 90% of the boundaries.

On the less positive side are a few features which mean very hard work.

• 80% of the land is overgrown.
• About half the surface area is infested with either brambles or bracken or in some places, both.
• It’s a very big plot (should probably also feature in positives above too!)
• Huge amounts of dead wood, some dry and some rotted (again, here are benefits too, chipped wood from dead branches can make good paths)

I’ve made no inventory yet of wildlife, of which there are abundant varieties in this area. I’ve seen a suspected badger trail. This brings to light a curious thing, ‘R’, a dairy farmer has absolutely no worries about badgers near his cows, and hasn’t even heard of anxieties in the UK about TB infection.

On the other hand, he and his wife say you have to look out for badgers (blaireaux) because they can kill your dog. I’m sure if a dog cornered a badger, the badger would defend itself, but as for being a threat to canines, it seems a bit unlikely!

I did notice that as soon as I cleared a lot of overhanging branches from the stream, dragon flies soon started darting about, clearly enjoying the dappled shade and nearby water.

Not being a bird watcher I can’t say much about the bird life apart from ubiquitous magpies, and the sounds of woodpeckers and cuckoos. I have noticed some obvious, and large, birds of prey with wingspans of 3 or 4 feet, but I don’t know what they are. They seem very laid back here and are often to be seen perching on quite low fencing stumps anmd only flapping away very lazily once you’ve come quite close.

Today is so hot that gardening is suspended – I hope that’s not taken as a sign of weakness, but without the power-saw, the only available work is clearing bramble thickets and dense drifts of bracken. In heat which must have risen to 32 C this afternoon, common sense prevails! Incidentally, news of the power-saw, the trançonneuse. The official bulletin is that she’s seriously ill in Nieul. The dealer there stripped down the machine and reported severe damage in the cylinder. My French is pretty good, but when it comes to a running commentary about the inner workings of a 2-stroke petrol engine, well my English wouldn’t be up to following, let alone my French. That was the bad news. The good news was that he said the damage wasn’t down to misuse or faulty handling. It was a most unusual case, but was down to a defective part in the motor. When I went to see him this morning, he called Stihl, France; they identified the machine and registered it through his dealership and accepted the Guarantee claim. So I may well have the machine back at the end of the week, or the beginning of next week. It’s a nuisance not to have it, but I’m relieved that I hadn’t inadvertently fouled up somewhere.   

Anyway  – back to basics – it’s about time I located the garden area in the French countryside. I’ve very roughly superimposed the official Plan Cadastral layout of the two fields, over the aerial photo of the road.   

Two fields in the Limousin

 The two plots have official numbers. The darker, thin tapering one is no. 58, and the larger trapezoid is no.57. The road is an ordinary country route departementale, so that might give some sense of scale The longest side of the big plot is about 82 metres. Given that two-thirds is overgrown with brambles, self-seeded trees and bracken there’s quite a lot of clearing work to be done. ‘R’ revealed yesterday that it’s about 30 years since the ground was maintained – an interesting piece of information as I had no idea how quickly or slowly land in this part of the world reverts to nature. The master plan is to gain access to all areas of the (would-be) garden. I can now manage to get into most of it apart from the right side of the big field. The only way through has been with brute force and the help of these most useful tools. The one on the left is pretty familiar as a hand-scythe, but I’d never seen the one on the right until ‘R’ lent me his for a few hours. I then bought my own. I found it very heavy to use, but this was made much easier when I took about a foot off the length of the shaft. It has all the feel of a medieval weapon of war, and in a soldier’s hand it could certainly do a lot of damage.   

Useful anti-bramble weapon

A Dragon fly enjoys the sun

Since my last post I’ve been back to the UK for six weeks – and one of the things I did was to buy a brand new Stihl 40cm chainsaw to help me attack the undergrowth. I returned to France a week ago and set about clearing some of the fallen timber that was making it impossible to even follow the boundaries of the land I’ve taken over. Fortunately, both fields are walled, though at times those walls are barely 2 ft high. I’m especially pleased that the land is marked out this way because I’ve long admired many of the ancient walls as I’ve been walking the footpaths of the Limousin. Anyway, I’ve managed to slash my way around about two-thirds of the perimeter so far, and am now getting a much better idea of what I’ve taken on. One really good thing for a wild woodland garden is an interesting set of levels, and this patch of land certainly has this. I still have no real idea of how the garden will be laid out, but I certainly want to make sure that the layout takes full advantage of  the differences in heights and slopes as well as the little stream which runs right through both fields. It’s very encouraging that despite what I’m told is an exceptionally dry summer here, the stream keeps running. Prospects are therefore good for a decent supply ow year round water if it’s required.   

Brambles!

The biggest and most strenuous part of the job so far is to clear enormous heaps of blackberry brambles. I’m well aware of the delights of the fruit, but these brambles are of the killer kind, with many of the trailing stems reaching at least six feet in length, and often having a girth of over half an inch and some as much as an inch. These stems are as strong as barbed wire and manage to bind all the undergrowth together, making it a very difficult job to clear. In addition you’ve to be really careful that when you’re pulling and heaving at the bramble stems, they don’t whip round on you and give you a series of really nasty cuts.   

Just one of many!

Catastrophe!

After managing to use the power saw safely and effectively for just three days – it died. It came to a stop in the usual way when it ran out of fuel. So I refilled it, checked the chain oil, and attempted to restart. On about the fifth pull, the whole thing seemed to seize solid. At first I thought it was simply the starter cord which had re-coiled badly, but no such luck. A quick investigation by a passing neighbour was fruitless, and he was obviously convinced I’d been running the machine on the wrong 2-stroke mixture, but I’d been very careful about that. So having heard that the main Stihl dealer in Limoges was deborde (overrun) with work, I discovered that a dealer in nearby Nieul was just about to re-open this morning after the usual August holiday. I thought that if I drove over first thing I might just get ahead of the inevitable rush to his place. Good thing I did, I think I was second in the door, but by the time I left, there were seven other customers waiting and the poor chap was looking very harassed. I’m now awaiting a ‘phone call with the verdict. If it’s not too bad (he already said that the piston was running free so it’s not completely seized) then I’ll pocket the charge, otherwise it will have to go back to Glasgow in mid-September to take advantage of the guarantee, and in the meantime, no tree cutting!

My house in Villarcoin

An important question – and that is, ‘how sensible is it to start a new garden from scratch when you’re looking at your sixty-fifth birthday in just a few weeks’ time?’. Well whether it’s madness or not, the die is cast and though I’ve not yet taken legal possession of the ground, the compromis de vente (agreement to the sale)  has been signed by all parties, and to all intents and purposes, the ground has been handed over to me. The whole lot consists of two disused and very overgrown fields about a hundred metres from my little house in the Limousin village of Villarcoin To be precise, the fields are labelled numbers 57 and 58 on the local plan cadastral (land-map).   

Maybe I should backtrack a little and add some more detail, because the original plan wasn’t to buy ground for a garden, but to buy a barn. When I bought my little village house, just about four years ago, it was more or less ready to live in, as long as you could tolerate Maigret era wallpaper. My only major outlay was to have a wood-burning stove installed in the main room downstairs and this I accomplished in January a couple of years ago. A major success apart from the first lighting when the whole house became like a sauna because I hadn’t figured out how to control the draught (and therefore the heat!) One main living room, kitchen, wc and long entrance hall downstairs, two bedrooms, bathroom and another wc upstairs; perfect. The only drawback was no garden, though there is a very handy little patio at the front which only measures about 2m x 7m, enough for 3 or 4 people to sit comfortably, as long as they don’t mind their knees touching!   

In fact having no garden has been a positive advantage for the last four years, at least I haven’t had to spend the first week of any time here desperately cutting grass, or paying someone else a fortune to do it for me. So now I suppose it’s payback time. Retirement (well, semi-retirement) looms this summer, so it really was time to take up my favourite hobby once again and get myself a garden. My friends who run a local farm had a barn to sell and this was a sensible buy for me; wood-shed, garage and tool-store all rolled into one. Once we’d decided on the deal, I mentioned that I thought it was time for me to find that patch of garden. They exchanged glances and before long they suggested that just maybe, a couple of fields they had and didn’t use might suit me. So we went to look, and they seemed ideal. A hundred metres from my house isn’t much, and it’s quite common in France to have one’s patch non-attenant (unattached). I think French inheritance laws account for the proliferation of parcels and pockets of land in different locations. So that’s how the land is passing into my possession. When the final purchase goes through in September, a barn and two fields will be officially and legally mine!