Grasses at Schilliger in Gland, Switzerland

Quiet spot for a butterfly, in the middle of a busy garden centre

Someone asked me recently for advice on what plants to grow in the Alps, in mountainous areas. I’m still reflecting on this and will write about it later, but two things came to mind immediately, because they have been so easy to grow: pumpkins, which love to run down a slope, and wild grasses, which thrive on our sunshine, general dryness and good drainage.

I then realized I have a small space to fill in my garden, and I headed for Schilliger Garden Center in Gland. It is the perfect time to buy grasses, for you can see them at their glorious best, with twirls and frills and long curly bits.

The variety is astonishing, from small ground-huggers to plumes that are more than two metres high. The contrast of textures and tones is a visual treat, especially this time of year when flowers are past their best and the eyes long to settle on something peaceful in a garden. Grasses waving in the breeze are perfect for this.

GenevaLunch photo album of Schilliger grasses, images from 5 October 2009

Fuji apples, just off the tree, a heavenly treat in Valais, Switzerland

We bought a piece of property a few years ago that had two apple trees, 75 and 100 years old at the time. The younger gave Canadas, good for pies, for two years, then began to die and this spring we had to cut it down. The older tree is still going strong and giving apples, a rustic Valais variety that no one grows anymore. It’s easy to understand why: it’s a bit too soft, some years the apples have little flavor and the minute you bite into them they turn brown. Not for today’s consumers.

So we planted two trees, a Fuji and a Braeburn.

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One small car, one large load of gorgeous plants

It’s been a rough and tiring summer, at work and at home, and the result is the equivalent of a bad hair day, called a bad garden summer. The lawn nearly died and had to be reseeded, one of my favorite flowers from the previous two summers turned out to be a ravenous weed and it took over. An expensive pine tree has suspicious brown needles. In short, the garden was three parts discouragement to one part joy in 2009. There is only one solution: visit a wonderful garden centre (in this case my favorite, Schilliger) and buy a carload of new plants! This requires more optimism about the state of the economy and my bank balance than the news page suggests, but what is gardening if not a reflection of optimism about the future?

Fortunately, my garden was spared the snow, but it was definitely a chilly rain that fell on my Alpine garden at 1,100 metres Saturday, 30 May. When the clouds cleared at the end of the day the peaks were covered in snow, as was a large meadow above us, near Aminona, at about 2,000 metres. Pity any hikers who were out for the long weekend!

Down below, farmer Bernard has been mowing the hay for his calves, too young to be out in the still cool and damp meadows.

My barrier between the garden and his fields, not very effective at keeping out wild meadow grasses and flowers, is a collection of irises. They always have a green backdrop and the additional pleasure of freshly grass or hay smells. Weeding the middle of each clump is not much fun at this time of year, though.

Shirley Curran normally writes about books, crosswords and skiing for GenevaLunch but it turns out she has another passion: ponds. She is our guest blogger, sharing the tresures of her Pays de Gex, France pond – not quite as close to the sky as my Alpine garden, but high enough.

By Shirley Curran

This morning I caught one of those rare moments – the yellow-collared grass-snakes (couleuvre à collier – natrix natrix) are usually very shy but this one was busy digesting an alpine newt (triton alpestre – triturus alpestris) he could barely move with his mouth so full, and I could even touch him. They are harmless to humans but wreak ravages on the newt, frog and tadpole population of the pond.

Yellow-collared grass snake, Pays de Gex garden

If you look carefully, you can see the newt’s feet. However, the newts are fairly voracious themselves – I have two varieties that are interbreeding – the alpine and the marbled kind (triton marbré – triturus marmoratus). They devour all the tadpoles!

My real loves are the yellow-bellied singing toads (sonneurs bombina variegata). We intervened to save them from being wiped out when a nearby pond was being bulldozed and they have returned to us every year since and breed in our ponds. They sing little high pitched notes and cheep and chatter very musically and softly.

They are intellingent and very curious and friendly – they like sitting on a warm hand.

Aquatic life in the Pays de Gex

Ed. note: I wrote to Shirley about my own surprising frog spawn, with questions because I’m new to frogs, and here is her reply:

My only advice about tadpoles is to be sure that they have somewhere they can put their legs and arms once they develop them. They are aquatic until then, but, at that moment, will drown if they can’t actually get a footing somewhere as they are amphibians from then on and need to be able to ‘walk’. They need stones near the water surface, or somewhere where they can get out of the pond. That’s why so many little kids have jars of frogspawn that die and rot – very sad.

Actually there’s a second bit of help – if you feed them dog or cat food in small quantities, or bits of raw meat, they will thrive on it – again, that is as they get their legs and change their diet (in a few weeks at your altitude – it’s altitude and temperature that control the speed of development). There are a couple of days before they become insectivore and leave the pond – I’m told they starve then, but doubt a lot of the rubbish that is in books, as my observations over the years don’t correspond.

The newts, toads, water snakes and so on will come by themselves. The snakes are a bit daunting at first, but are beautiful swimmers and very shy – and not at all dangerous.

Ed. again: so this leaves me wondering frogs? toads? the difference is? And here is what googling “frog toad difference” turns up: allaboutfrogs. We don’t have to declare them the experts, as Shirley reminds me, but I like to think all toads are frogs. And all frogs can become prince charmings.

Fresh peppermint, even before we have time to clean the winter rubbish!

My next to the last post was about the pleasure of finding dried peppermint leaves under deep winter snow, on the edge of the veranda or I would have needed a shovel. And then I, too, hibernated.

Now we have the raw pleasure of new, fresh peppermint leaves, hugging the ground, not worrying about whether or not the gardener has done her post-winter tidying of the beds. Each one is better than 10 sticks of peppermint gum or a whole sweet!

Snow and more snow: the winter of 2008-09 in the Swiss Alps

Bits of old Christmas tree: I leave them over the hydrangea for nighttime protection

An exceptionally long winter, with the garden buried for five months under nearly a metre of snow, has finally come to an end, and the garden has emerged. Unscathed – well, not quite. Broken branches had to be sawed off several bushes and trees, especially saddening on beautiful little Japanese maples, two of which now look lopsided rather than graceful. At 1,100 metres they don’t grow much over 1 of 1.5 metres, so they provide lovely colour and elegant lines at a midway height between bushes and trees.

Otherwise, the garden has benefited from a long, slow drink all winter, with several shrubs shooting up a few centimetres in height. Perennials are coming up strongly. Birds and bees are all active and noisy, and there is no sign at our place that the world’s bees are dying out, so perhaps we can offer them a refuge.

Alpine pond frog spawn

The greatest surprise was frog spawn, although I swept several balls out of the pond while cleaning it before I realized what I was sending down the bisse. Our pond is actually just a rock-edged pause in the mountain stream, coming in underground at one end and running out a small waterfall at the other end. We don’t keep fish because we can’t. They would quickly disappear downhill. So I never imagined frogs could breed here and they never have.

Here is what’s been growing my pond. Now to see if we get tadpoles or frogs from this. I know very little about these creatures, so telephoned a knowledgeable brother-in-law in southern England whose response was only “I hope you can still sleep if you get frogs!” Their nighttime chorus is loud to very loud. I looked up basic frog information online and found it contradictory, so I guess we let nature take its course and sit back to watch the show.

Peppermint at the edge of the veranda in summer

This recipe came to us from Liam Bates in Vancouver, who occasionally contributes travel articles to GenevaLunch:

Put mint leaves in a tea ball and let them steep in milk as you heat it for hot chocolate. Pour the milk over the dark chocolate powder, preferably Swiss!

So I gently lifted a branch of peppermint out of the January 1 snow this morning, pulled off the dried leaves and tried it.

I discovered that at least with dried leaves you need to heat the milk more slowly than I usually do with a speed heat burner. But the dried leaves are remarkably potent, keeping all their mintiness, so this was a wonderful winter garden surprise, even better than finding healthy sage leaves under the snow on Christmas Eve, just in time for the turkey’s bread and onion stuffing.

Dried peppermint revives when steeped in hot water or milk

Verdict on the peppermint hot chocolate: definitely delicious!

I bought a small jasmine plant at Schilliger Garden Center last June when I was tired of the cold weather we were having and the late start to the garden. I knew it was foolish to hope it would bloom in my too-cool Alpine garden at 1,100 metres, but there is a silly side to my gardening self.

I was right. It tried but never succeeded in doing much more than giving me one or two weak flowers. When the first frost came I thought I might as well bring it indoors and see if anything happened.

Here it is – it waited for Christmas Day to surprise me with wonderfully scented white flowers, with many more on the way. And just outside, behind it in this white on white scene, is a pile of good crisp snow. When the morning sun streaks in, the contrast is very cheering.

Click on image to view larger.

Dry southerly and warm foehn wind turns the Swiss Alps air yellow with its Saharan sand

If you’re an international person who moves around, one of the odd side benefits is that you learn about the many faces of snow. I grew up in the Midwest, in the US, and winters meant we had huge piles of heavy wet snow dumped on us. I remember walking to school along what felt like an open-top tunnel. We were small people then, but these were enormous piles that gradually sank. That’s what snow did in that flat land: it sank, and sank until late March, when green grass reappeared.

Then I lived in Minnesota, not far from Canada’s Midwest, and our snow was dry and light. It had a particular crunching sound and feel to it that you get only in very cold places. Everyone parked on the street and we had long extension cords running out to charge our car batteries during the night. Most people put blankets over their engines as well, at night.

A hole appears in the snow

Snow in Paris existed only in the sky, for once it came too close to buildings and people it turned into something else that was brown and sloppy, lacking beauty or elegance.

Snow in Ireland, near Galway, arrived just in time for Saint Patrick’s day in March. It crippled the countryside, but since nothing happens there in winter it made little difference. It had the extraordinary quality of a bird that’s landed in the wrong place and is temporarily stunned, before it gathers it wits or its courage and moves on.

But Switzerland! Oh, snow in the Alps is altogether different, coming in great dense piles and then settling  like an older child home for the holidays. It ignores our usual routines, our expectations of daily life: it’s noisy with snowplows (heavy metal). It has an ego.

The hole grows, thanks to pressure from the wind

Or so it seems until it is diminished by the foehn. This, to me, a lowlander, a flatlander, is the great mystery of snow in the Swiss Alps. It comes, it sits, it – gets pushed away by these strange yellow winds that blow from the Sahara.

I spent part of Sunday working near the window. The foehn is not a gentle wind in any sense, or to any senses – it roars around you, turns the air yellow, shoves up against the shutters and doors until they bang hard.

It blows the snow, getting into every nook and cranny and upright bank of snow until the white stuff can no longer resist.

The hole goes topless

First there is a hole in the snow. In the end, there is only the hole. The wind worked for two hours on the 100-year-old apple tree outside my window and won. The snow-decked tree was nearly stripped of snow in that time.

For further lessons on snow and how it works, the Swiss federal avalanche institute has a glossary that makes interesting reading if you are really trying to avoid going outside or looking for excuses not to work on your end of year bookkeeping.

Is this a snow hole?