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.

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

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.

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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.

Chores left undone: blackberries not trimmed, weeds not pulled, some potatoes still underground

No more garden chores! That’s the bright side, as winter lays its first mantle over a sadly neglected garden, covering the debris that should have been cleaned up, the flowers that were never dead-headed and even the weeds that were still arrogantly poking their heads out of my vegetable garden. Never mind that the lawn did not get scarified. In a moment of serendipity last weekend we pulled out the lawnmower for the last time and it vacuumed up the leaves we hadn’t raked.

This was the worst gardening summer I can recall, a combination of confused weather patterns and family problems that included my husband the digger and manure bearer having knee surgery, putting him out of garden action. I’m ready to pull down the blinds over a summer that brought me just one strawberry, five raspberries and not a single apple or cherry or pear from several fruit trees.

Occasional bursts of flower color from plants that survived drought and inattention from The Gardener sadly reminded me that most of these perennials are meant to be good neighbors, always there when you need them.

Snow white, rose red

I’ve learned two lessons from this unhappy year of unplenty. Firstly, that if you leave them to get on with life most garden plants and the rough company they keep, those nasty weeds, are charming even as they go down. And secondly, each season ends with the promise of a new one, bursting with goodness.

Here is a visual catalogue of the final days of 2010, before the snow wiped the slate clean. We had a sudden burst of rain and warmer weather mid-October, so 17 October I rushed around the garden snapping shots of each bit of color I could find, before they disappeared. The garden then fizzled out very quickly.

Last weekend, 19 November, we had one day of gardening weather and I pulled weeds and dug up potatoes, stripping down to a t-shirt. The weather was so mild before the sun went down that I didn’t bother to bring in the red weed bucket.

Silly me. The next day it was covered in snow. This weekend, the bucket is still out there, the snow deeper, and it has been well below freezing, with a wintry wind blowing. Brrrrr.

More photos in the album: Alpine garden 2010, the last hurrah

Errant camomile that I dug up 3 years ago keeps slipping into bed with the strawberries

Wild thyme, 100 small plants, were my one gardening success this year: planted on slopes in areas close to the farmer's fields, to spread and prevent weeds

I cleared a space under a tree and transplanted strawberries but forgot to water them during a dry spell, so no strawberries - but these violets started cropped up instead

These pink climbing roses looked bored and finished for the season and then along came some warm air and rain: party time again!

The milking hour

Spring comes slowly to the mountains, but when it arrives it does so with a bang and there is suddenly a massive amount of post-winter tidying to do: clean out the dozens of iris clumps, cut off dead flower clumps caught in bloom by November snows, remove dead leaves from the fruit trees that have snuggled into every nook and cranny. And, of course, weed, turn over the soil in the vegetable patch and put in the early plants.

But a bonus while doing all this in the mountains is that we have farm animals who are turned out to the pastures at mid-altitude (1,100 metres) for a few weeks. My garden has pasture on three sides and the beautiful Val d’Herens cows are out there happily chomping away all day, bells ringing. Late in the afternoon the older cows drift towards the barn and there’s more agitation in the air. Take a look at the photos. Definitely the milking hour!

Sheep about to be lifted over the fence to stay in a field with a dauntingly steep slope

We have two charming heifers in one of the fields, young and curious and when I go outside to work they trot up to the fence to say hello and watch for a while.

This week the heifers had another distraction, and they couldn’t take their eyes off it. A Swiss-German farmer from Brig puts a herd of sheep with tinkling bells in a field across the road from us and from the cows. He arrived one afternoon with a ram, with gorgeous big horns and a deep booming voice. The cows ran over to watch as he was put in the field, then stood transfixed for an hour, observing the sheep.

Before I knew it my chores were nearly done. Nothing quite like a good distraction.

Cows join me for a day of gardening, to the tune of Swiss cowbells

Val d'Herens cow in my neighbour's field, May 2010 in Valais

I’m beginning to realize just how blessed I am to have a garden at 1,100 metres above sea level, after reading in the New York Times about the latest rage among lowland gardeners.

Growing plants upside-down seems to cure a lot of plant ailments and get rid of many pests.

I have to confess that while the tomatoes might taste good, having made it to adulthood with their roots pointing to the sky, hanging them from the clothesline doesn’t do much for the landscape, and that’s one of the things I enjoy about my garden.

Photos: while out gardening like mad last weekend, two young heifers from the farm next door came to see what I was doing. We happily spent most of the day together.

I was weeding and planting 150 tiny wild thyme (serpolet, as it is known in French) plants among the raspberries to keep down the weeds that swagger in from the farmer’s field.

The young cows were keeping down the now-flowering meadow. Their brass Swiss cowbells clanged away as we both worked, pleasant music to my ears, along with the soft crunch-scrunch of grass and flowers getting chomped on.

Did you know this about cows: they have no upper teeth.

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Swiss cow, checking out the gardener

Let's get a good look at that gardener