My singing tree is a wise teller of time

Flowering apple tree fills my window view

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – My main criterion for the date when I can safely shop for plants, especially blooms for my garden is the flowering of the 112-year-old apple tree, a wise old thing. We pruned it radically 10 years ago, since no one had done it for at least 25 years, then we gradually slowed down the pruning and two years ago we decided to let it live in peace.

As a result, the fruit, an old variety that to be honest we don’t particularly like, is smaller and on branches no one cares to try to reach.

But the flowers! It is thick with white blossoms, so dense we lose sight of the bigger world, and the birds love it, so it becomes a singing tree in May.

It blooms later than trees on the plain, waiting until there is no danger of frost, although we often have one final spring snowfall around 15 May because we’re at 1,100 metres altitude. The tree takes this in stride.

It’s in full, gorgeous bloom right now, so I’m off to Schilliger for the start of my spring shopping spree. If I get carried away I’ll have some plants that must be brought inside at night for another three weeks, so wish me a little constraint.

And I’m taking the advice of a local garden work man who suggests that I buy fewer low-altitude plants and go to a specialist in Sion for higher altitude shopping. So join me while I shop at two garden centres this year.

In real life, small enough to hide under an old leaf that drifted into the pond

This has been one tough winter, with snow so deep it buried several trees, including my nearly two-metre tall dwarft pear tree. Broken branches, trees bent to the ground, rosebushes in pieces on the ground: the damage has been great, and the budget will have to stretch to several replacement plants.

But it’s not all gloom and doom, now that the snow is gone and the sun is making the veranda toasty again. The plants have loved all this winter moisture and many are showing more buds than we usually see.

And the pond has suddenly come to life!

We’ve only seen a couple frogs, tiny ones, in the past, after seeing many tadpoles. But we still had so much snow even two weeks ago that we couldn’t reach the pond, and we haven’t seen a single tadpole.

Today 10 or more frogs the size of a small fist have poked their heads out of the mud to sunbathe. And there are two clouds of frog spawn floating on the surface of the pond, so it looks like this is frog party year.

The little frogs sneak out of the pond to hide in the ivy around the edge, at the bottom of my rock garden.

The rock garden is offering us its first flowers after a handful of crocus blooms – pink and purple pulsatilla, or Paque flowers.

I expect to see nature hard at work to get the creatures balance right in coming weeks. The frogs will be happy about our bugs, and I hope they become expert at catching the flies from the cows next door. On the other hand, we are on a kind of neighborhood autoroute for cats, and I think we’ll see them sunbathing on the edge of the pond, waiting for the frogs.

The garden cleanup chores, and there are plenty, suffered a bit from the frog-watching today, but it was worth it.

That's a climbing rose struggling along the top of my metre-high fence, most of which has disappeared under drifts

My Alpine garden is under so much snow that it’s hard to believe we might have something growing there by June.

And I’m not sure how much my budget will have for lovely new things, since so much will go to replace the fence and broken trees after our stupendous 1-metre-plus snowfalls.

Another Alpine gardener, across the Rhone and a row of mountains in Zermatt, Bill, sent me this advice, with a photo taken from his kitchen window (you’ll find it here): “Look closely and you will see a bird I just fed by hand (cheese ends) flying in front of the church tower. If you have a friend in the states who can mail you garden seeds go to www.fedcoseeds.com. Some great producers.”

Closer to home I buy some seeds by catalogue from Wyss Select, which claims to be the largest online supplier, but I have a weakness for buying seed packets whenever I go to a plant store or garden center. And I’ve just received a message saying Schilliger’s sales are on until 11 February, uh-oh, and of course they will be starting to put out new seed packets.

Time to dream a little dream of warmer weather, the sun on the earth in my garden, ahhhh.

My heather, rich soft green in early July, fills in neatly between two lavendar plants, all of them happy on our dry sunny alpine slopes (low solar light hiding in there)

A lovely photo in The Guardian of an all-heather award-winning small garden from the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show appealed to me because it’s on different levels. With our mountainside slopes I have vague plans and dreams of some day building low walls to make terraced slopes, but these are projects for someone with more time and money.

The photo suddenly made me wonder, however, if Switzerland has heather and I realized I couldn’t think of the French for heather, since when I have seen it, mainly in Ireland and Scotland, I didn’t need my French.

Bruyère came up when I googled it and I had to laugh because of course my garden has it in several corners, and it’s famous in this part of the world as a plant you put in cemeteries. I was once told to be careful never to offer it as a gift, in Paris, for that reason. Meanwhile, chez moi, we could bury a lot of people, if heather is what is needed.

The laugh is on me because I’ve just cleaned out and redone our rock garden, and cutting back the ambitious heather was part of the job. I’ve been rooting out gangly plants I never liked, planting more flowers and a greater variety of colours. Now it needs two weeks for the plants to start producing more foliage and flowers, and this evening I will scatter nasturtium seeds, in shades of bright red and orange, around the bare edge of our bisse-fed pond, where the last of the tadpoles are quickly growing into miniature frogs.

Newly tidied rock garden - now to wait for the plants to grow and spread a bit!

Heather is used as a medicinal plant in homeopathic remedies, mainly for cystitis and urinary infections, according to Creapharma in Switzerland.

What I really had in mind was wild, blooming heather (which has sparked more than one song), Calluna vulgaris, and I found a lovely photo of it on a blog I’ve just tripped over, about Swiss wild flowers, flores et fleurs suisses. I’d like to thank the authors for their link to another interesting flowers site, new to me, Swiss Web Flora.

Heather does many nice things for a garden, and attracting bees is one of them in this age where we worry about disappearing bee populations. In Scotland it is reputed to bring happiness; there is surely a link.

For now it’s adding soft green but within weeks we’ll start to see pink and purple bushes there, a nice soft brush stroke of colour as the season evolves.

Spectacular, bright spring flowers, but at 1,100 metres, we can't put them outside until mid-May due to cold nights

Gorgeous flowers are everywhere in garden stores now, but for those of us with gardens at a higher altitude, it’s too early to put bright annuals outdoors. Patience, patience.

I gave into temptation Saturday and bought six plants that will have to brighten my dining room for the next month, before our nighttime temperatures are high enough to put them in veranda pots and set them outdoors.

My sister-in-law in England, who has a very large garden that wins competitions every year, told me last year that flowers should be bought in groups of three, to ensure good clusters with enough colour. I’m following her advice this year.

The magnificent vivid purple of the pericallus was too much to pass by at the garden centre. They are relatively easy-care plants, but will need to be  watered twice a week. I use water from our pond, fed by a mountain bisse, which I haul to the veranda in a bucket, so I don’t like flowers that require water more often than this. Annuals are pretty much limited to the veranda, as we are in the driest corner of Switzerland, and to avoid using precious water resources I prefer to have perennials, whose root systems can withstand dry spells.

A good scrub with a brush and water with some bleach will ready these pots for a mid-May planting session

A bisse is a Swiss underground snow melt streams that surfaces partway down the mountainside, channeled for irrigation. The mountains here have a fine web of these streams, mostly hidden.

Canton Valais has created a series of bisse walking paths in some of the areas where they surface. They are a great way to visit the Swiss Alps and pick up a bit of history, since some of the oldest irrigation channels were built well over 1,000 years ago.

Farmers use them for irrigation, a system of communal water-sharing. We do, as well, on a smaller scale, but we need to be fair and use just our share, keeping in mind the people lower down who also use them for their gardens to preserve drinking water supplies.

The pink flower, whose name I’ve forgotten (garden fatigue!) is a winner for this climate, as it’s happy even without regular water. I can plant it in the garden and it should flower all summer long. The plan is to put it in front of small rosebushes with varying shades of pink.

Three days of steady labour, aching bones and sore muscles: but check out that second photo! Visible weeds mostly gone, maverick potatoes, onions and garlic that we overlooked in the fall are also gone, soil is turned over and new onions, potatoes and garlic planted. We’re fairly manic about getting rid of the old potatoes, although the young, divided garlic can give us a bit of spring garlic.

The risk of disease and bugs is too great to leave last season’s vegetables. Potatoes, in particular, easily develop potato bugs if old plants are allowed to stay.

Lettuce cover gives us fresh salads two weeks earlier

In the ground now: 1kg each of Desirée, Ratte and Agata potatoes, 70 red onions and about the same number of white, about 30 lettuce plants of four varieties. Strawberries have been divided, replanted and fresh straw put around them to keep in the moisture and keep out slugs. That’s optimism, since without rain we won’t have slugs.

Patate.ch is a nice Swiss web site, in French, for learning more about potatoes, with planting and harvest times.

Our lettuce cover is a great addition, as it allows us to put the young plants out about two weeks earlier. It provides just enough wind protection and shade to help them along.

Grow, grow, grow! The harvest starts in early July.

The garden before, a challenging sight, and after, with 2 people labouring for 3 days

Serious gardening work lies ahead

Swiss Alpine garden planted! Foreground, dry manure waiting for pumpkin seeds, middle, onions and garlic, behind them the potato mounds, and newly replanted strawberries with fresh straw

Veranda, scrubbed and ready for barbecue and book-reading season, new second-hand tool cupboard under the window

Washing paste, Swiss bees wax and oil cream, Irish Burren gardener's cream (click on image to view larger)

If I had no other clues, my bone-weary hands today would tell me I spent too many hours catching up on garden chores yesterday.

The veranda has been swept, scrubbed and hosed down, a key chore so that I have a nice place to sit and admire my garden.

Just before shops closed I ran out to buy a second-hand cupboard for small tools to replace a dear but dying old table. I found just what I’ve had in mind for the past five years.

I weeded and weeded and weeded, and now the strawberry patch is mostly strawberries again. I’m planning to move them and used them in a decorative pattern with lettuce plants, which the slugs will love. No slugs at the moment, with too little rain.

Two fast-growing trees that threaten to give the flowers too much shade had a haircut, and the long branches were dragged down to the driveway, for next Saturday’s trip to the landfill. Yesterday’s trip to the landfill, a chore passed on to my fellow gardener, included an old barbecue and two large bags of weeds plus detritus that seems to accumulate around our garden.

The farmer next door moved the electric fence so his young heifers can nibble the grass next door, so seven of them kept me company as I worked – they are curious and love to watch what’s happening at our house.

My spring neighbours - when warm weather arrives they'll go up to the high alps

They are also frisky and, as Swiss fighting cows do, they tussle and lock horns several times a day. At one point, while two of them were doing this a third one, further up the hill, suddenly decided to charge them at full speed. They stopped in their tracks and stared in astonishment as she charged, but went right past them. She stoppped a couple metres below them and nonchalantly started eating grass again. Cow games!

Hands: gloves are a must to keep scratches and scrapes and dirt within bounds, but I have just stocked up on two other essentials, slightly gritty washing paste and bees wax plus oil gardeners’ handcream. I set aside about CHF30 of my garden budget for these every year. The washing paste works better than gel-type hobby handcreams, which are good for getting rid of oil but not garden dirt. And the bees wax + oil massaged in at the end of the day works wonders for soothing hands as well as keeping them human-looking.

Canton Valais, at 1,100 metres, fresh snow on the ground 14 April

I’m holding my breath to see if the fruit tree blossoms are able to resist our surprise snowfall last night.

Before I put in my contact lenses this morning I thought those were blossoms on the ground, under my plum and apple trees, but no, it was snow!

The sky is blue, the mountains a magnificent sharp white from the fresh snow, and it’s too chilly to pull weeds, so maybe we’ll just sit in the swing, relax and admire the view.

After all, that is the other reason for having a garden.

Late yesterday I gave in to the urge to plant and bought tomatoes and young lettuce plants, then left them in the car overnight because it was too late in the day to put them in the ground. What a stroke of luck, as the car was a better place to be last night. I’m reminded of my elderly neighbour’s warning not to be deceived by last week’s early warm weather.

Take heed, if you fancy a hike in the Alps.

Click on images to view larger

Aminona, near Crans-Montana: sprinkling of snow around houses at 1,700 metres, thicker on the slopes at 2,000 metres

Val d'Anniviers with a fresh dose of meringue-like snow on the peaks 14 April

Rock garden tidying time in the Alps, mid-April

Two weeks of very unusually warm weather and, even in the mountains, we’re tempted to call it spring.

My elderly neighbour, who has spent her life here and who remembers the weather from past years, like a good farmer, says we’re having August in April, “and that’s not normal!” she worries.

I resisted the temptation to plant, as at 1,100 metres altitude, the days might be warm, but the temperature spread can be huge, with still-chilly nights.

Last weekend I had to mow the lawn, very unusual here before May, and I finally admitted today that Nature’s clock is ahead of mine.

I made out my “urgent” garden chores list this morning:

• scarify the 75% of the lawn I didn’t do last weekend
• use the little handcutter to tidy the edge of the grass, especially along the walk and edge of the veranda
• straighten the wonky fences
• drive in the stakes we put in for small border fences last autumn – they would only go in halfway, with baked soiled back then
• use my little 3-pronged light plastic tool to gently pull out dead leaves from around the bushes and clippers to cut off some of the dead flowers, leaving enough old stalks above them to protect them a bit in case of a sudden cold spell
• convince someone else to reduce the foot-high dead tree stumps, from winter clearing, down to ground level
• separate and move strawberries that I’ve decided will fill a hillside space I created by digging up hopeless grass (more holes than greenery).

And if I have any energy left after that, there is the little weeding tool for reducing dandelions and clover to more manageable populations. People here eat dandelion leaves with bacon and hard-boiled eggs for a spring salad, and since we don’t use chemicals I could do that, but have never made it a priority.

Maybe this is the year to try.

One last chore is to tidy the rock garden: dig up the unwanted flowers that ran down hill reproducing all the way, cut down a few small bushes that suddenly outgrew the garden, and remove dead plant life to make room for the new that is pushing up everywhere.

Next to the hilly rock garden is a lovely pond, fed by an underground stream, a “bisse” as they are known in Valais, one of the thousands of mini-streams fed by glacial melt. It’s filled with dead leaves, grasses, detritus including bits of old flowerpots.

But it is thrumming with life, suddenly filled this week with tadpoles. A friend who knows about these things assured me last year that frogs love having hiding places and a pond that isn’t too tidy, so cleaning it will have to wait until the tadpoles make it to the next stage of their amazing lives and jump out of the pond.

I tripped over this great little video on what’s happening to our bees. It’s a mix of French and English, but one of the main messages is that intensive farming isn’t doing the ecosystem, including bees, much good. The group of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament put this on their broadcast network.