I’ve never found an answer to this and I’d love to know: why did nature choose purple and orange for autumn flowers? So many of our most spectacular late-season blooms are these colors, mostly in deep tones. The sun is lower in the sky, and in the mountains this means it leaves deeply angled streaks of light, which these richly colored flowers pick up beautifully, creating an outdoor cathedral when the light hits them.

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Too busy planting and cleaning out flower beds to write much, but the warm weather has brought a gorgeous explosion of colour to the garden, starting with these irises and bleeding hearts.

I couldn’t resist putting the closeup lens on the camera.

I used to think our slopes, warm days and cool nights in the mountains were perfect for irises until someone burst my bubble by telling me they grow just about anywhere.

That’s a good thing in the end. They are gorgeous!

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

Tulips, Swiss Alps

Flower shops filled with tulips in the spring always surprise me, because I almost never cut my tulips to bring them indoors, and I forget that other people fill vases with them and set them around the house.

I think I’m lucky to have streaks of gay color from them spread around outside, brightening the view from every window. The Dutch have done such a superb job of taming them that we forget these are magnificent mountain wild flowers. My favorites are red ones that tumble down from the top of the field next door, true farmer’s tulips.

I plant more exotic varieties and a lot of colors, but these are more susceptible to the cold, and the temperature can dip below freezing until at least mid-May, sometimes later, at 1,000 meters altitude.

Tulips bending from beautiful blooms' weight

Last weekend I was enjoying this particular variegated group when I noticed that one, a lovely flower, had a broken stem.

The cold at night weakens the stems and when they are top-heavy with luscious blooms they tumble over, sometimes breaking the stem.

I took it inside, put the single bloom on its side in a small wooden dish, no water, and it became our centerpiece for two days, giving off a deep perfume while we admired its elegance indoors for a change.

The color and perfume remained far longer than I expected, reminding me that for all their delicate beauty, tulips are pretty tough! I don’t cut the stems of mine – there are far too many – and I don’t dig them up, just hoping they will make it through tough winters. I do divide them when they multiply to the point where the flowers start to get smaller, once every 3-4 years. Gardener Doug Green has some sound advice on caring for tulips. One especially good tip: don’t water them after they’ve bloomed.

The fallen tulip finds a home inside

Back out in the garden, another spring treasure was the sudden blossoming of the strawberry plants, We’re a good two weeks below the gardens down the hill, on the plain, but I’m happy to wait: I’d wager our strawberries are among the world’s best!

Alpine full-size strawberries give us these charming flowers a month before the berries are red and ripe

Tadpoles fight over the bacon bits (white) in my pond

I’m new to the frog business, having unwittingly swept them out and over the edge of our pond for a couple years. It’s fed by an underground stream, then has a little waterfall on the lower end. Last year, to my astonishment, I discovered that the blob of little balls floating on the surface was frog spawn. Don’t ask how well I did in biology classes.

I rushed to the Internet and friends to learn more and, in the process, I fell in love with these funny little creatures who fill our pond in the spring. Last year they happily reached the tadpole stage and I think I spotted one tiny frog later, but they mostly just disappeared.

Shirley Curran, who writes the GenevaLunch book blog and creates our new crosswords, is a general knowledge marvel, and she told me that at a certain stage they need a little meat to survive. I had visions of every cat and rat in the neighbourhood coming to nibble on bits of meat left at the edge of the pond.

Then yesterday my husband, busy preparing our Sunday brunch, decided to toss a couple snips of raw bacon into the pond.

They loved it! The tadpoles spent the rest of the day going after those bacon bits and by evening the little creatures already looked bigger to us.

Now to see if we get any frogs. It’s a jungle out there, next to the farmer’s field.

Bernex, canton Geneva

Saint Prex, Vaud

Pink in Versoix!

I wrote earlier today on my Among the Vines blog that a Petite Arvine I’d tasted has a nose of wisteria, and if you aren’t sure what this smells like, step outside because it’s in bloom.

I also wrote that it’s generally pink – only to step outside and see purple wisteria everywhere today! Do step up, close your eyes and breathe deeply.

Passion in the ponds

Frogs in Jura pond (photo, ©2010 Shirley Curran)

Late April at 1,100 metres, they are still just tadpoles (photo, Ellen Wallace)

The surest sign of spring at 1,100 metres altitude is not among the flowers, where the bees have been busy, or among the trees, filled with birds: it’s in the pond.

We watched the odd balls that hold spawn as days grew longer and warmer. About two weeks ago tiny, tiny tadpoles began to appear and the balls began to self-destruct.

The tadpoles grow by the day, have become more vigorous, and we are waiting to see if some will turn to frogs and stay with us. Every year in May they head downhill with the bisse (mountain irrigation) stream that feeds our pond and provides a small waterfall, and we rarely see the frogs before they disappear.

Shirley Curran has shared photos from her warmer, lower altitude ponds, where tadpoles have become charming, active and amorous frogs already!

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Frogs in Jura pond (photo, ©2010 Shirley Curran)

Frogs in Jura pond (photo, ©2010 Shirley Curran)

GUEST post by Shirley Curran

A hike in the Jura mountains

Wild daffodils, melting snow, Jura April 2010 (photo, Shirley Curran)

It is very quiet up on the Colomby de Gex during the week but, today, we saw 13 chamois. It is difficult to know what they are eating on the barren cliff side but they are very busy.

The green woodpeckers, jays and cuckoos were noisy and we saw a rare sight, an eighteen-inch long Jura viper. Sadly he was dead; he had probably been dropped by a predatory bird.

However, the most spectacular sight was, as it is every year, the vast fields of wild daffodils.

There are thousands of them up there and today they were in full flower and at their most beautiful, just below the last vestiges of snow.

Ants get wings in Barbara's garden: July

Update 21:50  The first year after my marriage we had ants, hundreds of them, who suddenly showed up when the weather turned warm. I had no intention of playing the good housewife who made sure the house was clean and free of insects, but I was driven to putting down ant killer. I hadn’t really thought much about ants since I was five years old and was given hell by an older sister for sitting on the curb and catching ants then pulling the legs off them. It was the last truly violent act of my life until the ants came into my newlywed apartment.

And they never came back, which is even more of a mystery to me than why they were there in the first place. In 25 years of living in the same place I expect weather, climate and other cycles to have repeated, at some point, the conditions of that first year of marriage. But no.

I thought about those ants again when overthemoon, who contributes beautiful photos to GenevaLunch via flickr, recently wrote that she was setting out cinnamon to chase away a sudden infestation of ants. What a civilized solution, I thought. I wrote to ask if it worked and here is her reply:

I put a little heap of ground cinnamon behind the taps on the washbasin, and scattered some more beneath the cutting board in the kitchen (we had ants all over the floor, table and working surfaces). And not a single ant in sight since! So I think it is effective, unless they are staying underground because of the rain.

They come every March, but I don’t complain too much because our landlady, on the two floors above us, gets them in their thousands. You just have to tap on the doorframe and they all come rushing out! I suppose this was their home before the house was built.

In July they have wings and fly off – I see the grass glittering with them, they climb to the top of blades of grass and take off into the skies and I watch clouds of them rising (it always seems to happen on a warm Saturday afternoon when I’m sitting outside).

Oxford University Press has just published a book that I think I might buy, On Ants, by Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon. The OUP mentions that “ants are not only efficient, they are hard-working and thrifty, qualities which have always seemed like good reasons for seeing them as virtuous role models.” Another case of why we should get to know those we think are our enemies, because once we do, we won’t want to kill them.

Most remarkably, Keller is a neighbour, it seems, professor and head of the department of ecology and evolution, at the University of Lausanne, just down the road from overthemoon’s ants. I had a good laugh when I saw their web page – you will too, I suspect. Do ants jump, I wonder?

Overthemoon just wrote that a friend of hers on flickr, Sati K, has an extraordinary photo of ants. It is a very humbling shot of creatures hard at work (no Internet browsing for these guys), and well worth a look.

This also reminded me of the other kind of ants, the ones who build high-rises in the middle of Africa, Asia and a few other warm places.