Postcards from France - Trisha's Meanderings
From Snow to Sunshine
I feel as though I’m in a parallel universe here in France, with temperatures soaring into the high 30s, while my garden back at the foothills of the Snowy Mountains slumbers under a blanket of snow, frost, and fallen leaves. I’ll be back there by the end of the month—but for now, I’m not missing the cold one bit. Nor do I feel guilty about the lack of TLC it’s receiving. One of the blessings of gardening in a cold climate is the long winter dormancy. Apart from a few stalwart bloomers, the garden sleeps for months on end—a perfect time to dream up new planting schemes for those balmy summer days ahead.
Plants That Defy the Weather
I’m always on the lookout for plants that bloom no matter the conditions. At home during winter, that means hellebores, winter honeysuckle, wintersweet, and Viburnum tinus. Here, in the absolute melting heat, the buddleias are in full flower and absolutely in their element. Butterflies adore them for their generous nectar. I just cycled past a large buddleia along the path—completely surrounded by a cloud of vividly coloured butterflies.
GARDEN WITH LE SAC
The paths are strewn with flowering angelica, Queen Anne’s lace, and wild carrot—plants that are, in truth, almost clones of each other. Add dill and fennel with their lime-green umbels, and you have a palette of my hero plants for creating an instant garden. This is the perfect season for planning, dreaming, and ordering seed packets to scatter with the first showers of early spring.
A Tennis Court Turned Wild Potager
About ten years ago, some dear (tennis) friends helped me transform a disused tennis court into a potager. Weekly tennis moved to the public courts in nearby Cooma, while the old court slowly became a productive garden. For a year or so, it looked like a well-behaved potager, but then—especially post-COVID—when I returned from overseas tours straight into the Australian season, the garden received little attention and quickly developed a life of its own… voilà!
The result? A romantic, wild, overgrown garden where culinary herbs like onions, shallots, thyme, parsley, silver beet, salad greens, and chives grow among meadow-style blooms. It’s a garden for grazing meals and for filling the house with armfuls of flowers. Most of them bloom in creamy whites, verging on lime green, with the one vivid hit of colour from wild Verbena bonariensis. Its hue is similar to that of the buddleias and, though often overlooked by Aussie gardeners as a roadside plant, that’s exactly what drew me to it. If it thrives without care or water, it’s my kind of plant. Its strong stems keep it upright, letting it sit beautifully among the umbel blooms. I’ve seen it featured more and more in the smartest gardens and parks across Europe, where it’s prized for its long flowering season, striking colour, and upright habit.
GARDEN WITH LE SAC
Winter Reflections and Spring Planning
With long winter evenings and not always the incentive to be outdoors on windy, cold days, this is the ideal time to dream up romantic garden schemes for the summer ahead. The thinking and planning are as much fun as the creating and doing!
Trisha xx
