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.

Crashed car in Thurgau garden, Switzerland (photo: Thurgau police)

Our Christmas tree has been languishing on the veranda, in its stand, but it must have dried out because this week it blew into my rock garden where it is still sitting. No one wants to go out into the damp to move it. It’s an odd decoration.

Even odder, though, is the crashed car that is sitting in a garden in canton Thurgau, Switzerland, after a 22-year-old driver crashed there. He ended up in the hospital after pitching his car nose first into the garden.

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.