Purple And Pink

Purple And Pink (And Yellow)
There's a song from the Sound Of Music that starts something like “yellow and red and pink and blue.............(I can sing a rainbow)”. Well, that's what is going on all around here. On a drive down to Avignon today I couldn't help noticing that all the Judas trees as well as the lilac, tamarisk and wisteria are in full bloom, providing a back drop of purple and pink. To add to it, the thyme by the wayside is in (lilac coloured) bloom along with the wild irises. Normally at this time of the year the roadside will be awash with scarlet poppies also, which doesn't say a lot for Nature's s sense of colour coordination but certainly puts on a show: a kind of Las Vega show, gaudy and spectacular, lacking on taste. This year, however, the poppy crop is sparse; I'd already noticed in my back garden that whereas normally I'll have 12-15 self-seeded poppies this year I have only four or five. Can't be a good year for poppies.

Higher up, it's all yellow with the wild coronilla bushes blooming their hearts out. Some friends of friends out here on a walking trip said they kept getting whiffs of a lovely scent on their walks but couldn't place it. They came for aperitifs a couple of evenings ago, smelled the coronilla in my back garden and the mystery was solved. It really is a lovely plant. The hillsides will stay looking yellow for some time, although the scent will go, as the coronilla gives way to broom.

The poppy “phenomenon” intrigues me. I understand some of the situations which cause insect populations, for instance, to rise and fall but can't think why this should apply to plants, particularly over a wide geography. Earlier in the year I remarked to friends Steve and Jo that their hazel trees seemed overladen with catkins this year and that they should have a bumper crop of nuts in the autumn. In England visiting my mother in March I noticed the same thing in the hazel trees there. Why? We have had a mild winter and southern England a particularly hard one, so the weather conditions can't be the cause.

Book Promotion
This afternoon I went to a book “promotion” at the English library in Beaumont. It wasn't really a promotion because the author, Bill Larksworthy, had published the book himself and was never likely to sell many copies. (I was lucky with the books I wrote in that I was asked to write them and so didn't have to look for a publisher.) He's apparently led an interesting life as a doctor in various parts of the world but primarily in Saudi Arabia and was persuaded to write his “memoirs” because of his ability as a raconteur at dinner parties. Unfortunately he didn't want to give his stories away as he thought that might negatively impact sales, which he wasn't going to get anyway, so we didn't really get the benefit of his raconteur abilities. It could have been a really good afternoon but in a way it was a nonsense; however, he was interesting enough not to make it a waste of time. He had, in any case, enjoyed writing the book and that I suspect is the lesson for all the would-be authors out there. If it's worth doing for yourself, it's worth doing. Anything else is a bonus.