Ellen Wallace
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.
GenevaLunch, 11 May 2009.
Filed under: Garden
Tags: Alpine garden, frogs, hydrangea, pond, spawn, Switzerland, Valais
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 11th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
[...] note: I wrote to Shirley about my own surprising frog spawn, with questions because I’m new to frogs, and here is her [...]
May 12th, 2009 at 10:51 am
With regard to the cackling and racket that some frogs make – fortunately only one of the breeds resident in our area is a cackler. The Maison Blanche golf club, about 500m from our house, has them and we can hear them. We like the sound but it can be disturbing (like barking dogs!) for people who don’t – that breed stays around all summer, though they do move from pond to pond. Our own common frog breed (rana rana – muddy browns and greys, not the ridibunda which has a yellow stripe on its greenish back) only grumbles and rumbles for about the three weeks of the mating season. They leave the water (generally) and only return for occasional visits when the female has laid the spawn. As you have no sitting, cackling residents, you are unlikely to have any problem.