In the shade

Today I took photos of flowers. S went off for a walk in the morning, and I had to pop out to buy a few bits and pieces for dinner. After shopping, I wandered round Fabrezan with the camera and found a whole meadow of the plantains I blipped on Friday. I love these little plants! I took about 10 photos of them from every angle, but I felt I couldn't blip them again, not even this rather unconventional view. In the same field I found some other amazing flowers that start out looking like a gemstone setting before springing open into vivid stars. No idea what these are either.

In the afternoon S phoned me from our friends' bergerie (shepherd's hut) on the mountain, so I walked up there to join them. Our German friend A and his two brothers bought this hut as a ruin thirty years ago, and restored it from a pile of stones into a petit paradis with a fabulous view over the village and towards the Pyrenees. It's a truly magical spot. It came with a lot of land, and over the years they have not cultivated it exactly (other than planting olive groves) but managed it in such a way as to encourage native garrigue plants to thrive. That means cutting down around a hundred Aleppo pine saplings -- the scourge of uncultivated and unpastured land here -- every year. They always have plenty of wood for the fire.

Of course there's no mains water or electricity, but there is a well, a small wind turbine, and some solar panels. After a cup of tea on the terrace we went for a wander through the woods and A showed us the old terraces he has gradually restored. Fifty or a hundred years ago, this wilderness must have looked very different, dotted with tidy little jardins potagers, rows of cabbages, beans and potatoes for families from the village. Now it's all overgrown with chêne vert and chêne blanc (Mediterranean species of oak), and scented by masses of sage, rosemary, and thyme. Here and there some fruit tree saplings have sprung up, the blossom glowing against the dark woodland*.

I really couldn't choose today, so I've put the rest of my photos on flickr. Nearly everything is SOOC, except for a bit of cropping and contrast adjustment, because nature didn't seem to need any enhancement.

Apart from that, I made some scones with my surplus sourdough starter. They are not quite like real scones, but they're very nice -- I'll make them again, and probably put the recipe on my long-neglected blog.

PS I blackblipped yesterday -- a rare attempt at night photography.

* or S's conveniently placed black jumper in this case -- I liked the way it made the blossom stand out.