Two against the jungle - Part 2

 Towards the end of August we returned to France. Under the regulations then (and now) current we knew we would have to self-isolate for a fortnight on our return, so we decided to stay for a month to make it worth while.

Now battle was joined in earnest. 

I should note that my husband is not a young man - next week he will be 78. I am younger, but by no means young, and we both have joint problems. But to see him in action in France wielding heavy, awkward machinery and working for hours at a stretch you'd never believe it. First he had to get the worst of the grass down with the wheeled strimmer, which has an engine but still has to be pushed. After that the grass was low enough for the mower. To clear the orchard, which slopes steeply downwards, he first towed the strimmer to the top of the garden on the back of the mower. Then he strimmed down as far as the drive. He then walked back up and mowed down over the roughly-cut strip - a sequence repeated many times over several days. Because the grass was so long, mowing resulted in swathes of hay everywhere which if  left would have killed the grass underneath, so after mowing he had to attach the hay collector to the back of the mower and pile it all up in heaps. Here he is doing just that. The very long untouched grass is visible in the background.

Things began to look a bit clearer; trees and shrubs started to emerge.

All this while I was not idle! I wielded the small strimmer in awkward spots, clearing round the shrubs and making space, as well as cutting back and weeding. We were blessed with the weather: it rained only twice during that month, but it was hot, and we got very sticky and dirty. Here's the bank from which in years past I evicted a huge mass of brambles and on which I then planted other things - invisible till I strimmed it.

What to do with all this hay and clippings? Over the weeks we were there, apart from regular trips to the dump, we must have had 6 or 7 bonfires. Here I am, nattily dressed as always, feeding the blaze.

As well as clearing the garden we were also working on the small outbuilding which collapsed last autumn. This involved getting rid of floor-to-ceiling bundles of mouldy twigs which in decades past would have been used to fuel the bread oven. I lost count of how many barrowloads we shifted.

At the end of the day, a well-earned break and a glass of wine!

Finally, the jungle began to look more like a garden.

And as well as all the work, we managed to find time for a bit of sociable fun. Here we are with friends, enjoying a musical evening and a game of croquet.

 

Two against the jungle - part 1

 We left our French house at the end of February, after a couple of weeks cutting down trees. I am a big fan of trees in  general and we have planted quite a number over the years, but these were almost-defunct cider apple trees which dropped their fruit every autumn creating a slippery mass of rotting apples, dangerous and unsightly. There was a time when our neighbours would pick the fruit and make it into cider, but the only licence to do this was held by our neighbour's mother who died recently, and our neighbours are no longer able to pick the fruit. So we decided to cut the trees down for firewood. Two of them we logged and stacked, leaving just the twigs on the ground. The third we cut and left on the back garden in its entirety, having run out of time. 'We'll be back in a month,' we said. 'The grass won't have grown much.'

How wrong we were.

For this was 2020, the year of rapidly-escalating infections and restrictions on movement.  In normal times we wouldn't ever have left our French garden at the time of maximum growth, but these weren't normal times, and we didn't get back until July.

The grass was thigh-high, dry and brown. My little shrubs were invisible, the bigger ones just battling to get their heads above the rampant growth. It was a daunting sight. Here's the whole cut tree as it lay 

     awaiting our efforts, and the view up the garden before we began: 

                                  July saw some of the hottest temperatures across Europe, and we spent a lot of that trip pulling dead twigs and branches out of long, tangling grass, cutting them up, taking some to the local dump and burning others before logging the big branches and the trunk. We did the whole tree and the twigs from one of the others. It was hard, rough work, and when we had done all we could I said, 'If I never see another twig, it will be too soon.' 

Of course that wasn't all that was horribly overgrown. We turned a blind eye to the towering hedges, but I couldn't let my old enemies the brambles get away with their takeover bid. This is what they looked like sprouting unchecked out of a small hedge adjacent to the covered laundry area:

The lower drive looked like this:

The vegetable patch was a tangle of gone-to-seed leeks and purple sprouting:

The gravelled drive was overrun with weeds, which over several days I pulled up by hand:

And even when strimmed, using the big wheeled strimmer because the grass was too long for the ride-on mower, it still looked rough:

But then our time ran out, and we had to come home.

Website refurb!

In the interests of not letting The Healing Knife disappear into Lockdown Limbo, my trusty web wizard has updated my website. Why not take a look?

www.slrussell.net

Another interview!

Today Wendy H Jones' podcast  The Writing and Marketing Show featured me being interviewed about my latest novel The Healing Knife, and other book-related things. If you can spare a bit of time, why not have a listen?

Here's the link: http://wendyhjones.buzzsprout.com/807761

Hard Times

In the midst of catastrophe, it's an insignificant matter. But to a writer whose book comes out in the middle of a pandemic lockdown it's a disaster on a smaller scale: publishers and marketing teams are working from home, international book fairs have been cancelled, book shops are closed, and my launch has been postponed to an uncertain date. Perhaps there is an upside; perhaps people are having more time to read, and I hope this book is hopeful in tone. I am thankful for the internet and social media too. So if you haven't already got a stack of paperbacks and a lengthening list on your kindle, here's another possibility for you. Meanwhile, keep safe and well.

Interview

Today I am a guest on the blog of award-winning Ruth Clemence. Here's the link: https://ruthclemence.com/29/12/06/an-interview-with-sue-russell/

Catastrophe in France!

At our house in France we have  two external outbuildings (called 'dependances'), both picturesque almost-ruins. They are constructed from timber and a clay mixture using all sorts of ready-to hand materials - straw and horsehair and cowdung among them, I believe - and roofed with heavy orange tiles. The larger one is due for reroofing in February in order to extend its life. The smaller one was originally a bread oven, but the dome-shaped brick structure that housed the oven itself had gone long before we owned the house, leaving only its rickety housing, which fell partially earlier this year. When we arrived a few days ago we found that the front section of the building, which contained a lot of elderly kindling and random chunks of wood, had collapsed quite spectacularly. This wasn't entirely unexpected; bits had been falling off for a while, and one corner was held up by a black twist of dead ivy,  but we had hoped it might last a bit longer. Unfortunately we haven't been in a position to save both buildings. I guess the three weeks of almost constant rain that they've had here didn't help. The side wall, made of 'colombage' or half-timbering, fell sideways, what remained of the roof slid off, and immediate casualties were some of the vegetables growing in our kitchen garden: leeks, rhubarb and purple sprouting broccoli. Fortunately the builder who is to do the work on the larger building has agreed to clear what remains of the small one - everything that we don't want to keep and are unable to clear by ourselves. So since the weekend we have been hauling broken tiles, stacking sodden timber and chainsawing up huge beams, which when dry will serve as free firewood.
It's always the way - when we come to our French home there are things we hope to do, and inevitably something else happens which puts those plans on hold. Last time we had trouble with our internet and found ourselves trimming trees instead of hedging. This time the hedges will have to wait while we clear rubble! When the site is finally empty all that will remain is the central stone wall. The stones are mortared with 'torchis' - the clay mixture - so we will have to cap the wall, or rain will wash away the clay and the whole lot will collapse. So it goes!