Out and About in a Corner of Normandy ….. June Diary

  Out and About in a Corner of Normandy

June Diary

Driving around in the lovely June sunshine, expectations of wild flower embankments and verges have not been disappointed. Just between here and Flers, Athis, and Conde sur Noireau, hedgerows, trimmed within an inch of their lives, are balanced by massed foxgloves, marguerites, and numerous other wild flowers left to proliferate and decorate the roadsides. They really are lovely. Here are a few I photographed, Dom stopping and starting with great patience to allow me to hop in and out of the all singing all dancing car and run about with my camera.

 

Sadly the photos don’t do justice to the exhilaration of being out in the sunny countryside surrounded by all this natural beauty, but I remember…..

How to convey?

Foxgloves march along the roadsides and wave out from the hedgerows.

 

 

 

 

Yellow Birdsfoot trefoil is spattered along the gravelly hard shoulder.

Just a few poppies splashed crimson on the edges of crop fields.

 There is a proliferation of yellow daisy-like flowers this year.

Red Campion is doing well too.

 A familiar what? I can’t remember its name…gggrrr!!

Comfrey?

I love the French name for dog rose; eglantine, do remember that!.

People’s front garden drives and gates sometimes had glorious flower masses too, just on the corners and entrances…glowing mesembrianthemums

These white bells are like the blue ones in the garden……campanula persicifolia. They are like giant harebells and are perennials, popping up year by year in the right weathers.

 

We passed glowing banks of colour on the way to Conde sur Noireau…..

Scented rainbow strips through the car window.

 

This arch of roses was gorgeous last year; and here it is again.

I like the way the rigid tidiness and exuberance of mounds of planted flowers, fancy pattern plantings on roundabouts, and tidily cut hedges and bushes is balanced by the wayside wildernesses.

The simple beauty of nature is highlighted by sunlight and shadow, along leafy lanes.

Such wild serendipity I find highly attractive. It has an orderliness of its own.

There are other, stranger things to spot on our any day shopping route.

This, for example:

Impressive by any standards, it looms over ten feet tall as I take the photographs!!

Woe betide anybody breaking and entering that little factory after midnight, when the ghosts and ghoulies are about! I imagine that this fella will just aim and shoot, no questions asked!

Back home, we watched the pigeons flying around the church, jostling for best squatting places along the parapet of the church tower.

One pair stayed together all the time, and flew round and round. They were

fabulous to watch. Their underside wings, almost white and outlined darkly,

looked beautiful.

Around the Mairie, just up the road, is the customary display of gorgeous roses.

Over the orchard, a fabulous view of the other side of the valley is being further eroded by ‘progress’…..no doubt nicer for the cows.

Over to the west, a pre-sunset view is abnormally green, blue and subdued.

On the doorstep one morning I was greeted by a beautiful moth. It looked old, and feeble, but it stayed in the grass all day, and I saw it last on the apple tree trunk. The next morning it had gone: eaten or flown?

Scarlet tiger moth…callimorpha dominula…[I think]

Even the nasty, black flies can provide fodder for presenting flowers in a different way.

Kestrels are back in their usual window space, high up in the grenier/attic

From outside a little head peeps out…..

…From inside shadows loom and fade as the baby kestrels try their wings and legs!

In an overgrown corner, by a wall, flowers this beautiful shrub, which I feared that I had lost, when I cut out the dead wood on a straggly bush a few years back.

Is it a Deutzia, like Jane’s?

 

Anne ….. June 16^th 2014