La belle bête, en deux langues

For English, scroll down.

La défeutreuse

Bon, belle, je ne sais pas. Puissante. Ça oui. Elle me tracte d'un bout à l'autre de la pelouse. Seul problème, elle pèse 52 kilos, ou presque mon poids. Le problème qui se posa fut de la sortir de la voiture toute seule une fois arrivée à la maison ce matin. Le monsieur chez Kiloutou fut gentil et alla me chercher une planche pour pouvoir la faire descendre, seulement la planche fut déjà un problème rentrant car la machine roula vers l'arrière des appuis-tête chaque fois que je rétrogradai et puis vers l'arrière de la voiture à l'accélération, la manche rentrant dans la vitre arrière. Il fallut que cela n'arrive qu'une fois avant que je me décidai qu'il valait mieux dédier la main droite à tenant la machine en place, laissant la main gauche libre pour rétrograder et conduire.

Quand j'arrivai, tirai la planche d'en-dessous du scarificateur et la posai contre l'arrière de la voiture, le problème qui se présenta fut comment le faire descendre la pente de 45° sans qu'il ne caisse pas les chevilles. Je réfléchis et mis un pied en haut, contre la machine en la tirant vers la porte. Une fois lancée, il serait trop tard pour faire demi-tour. Callant les 52 kg du scarificateur avec le pied droit et moi-même avec le pied gauche, je le laissai aller, centimètre par centimètre jusqu'à ce que je dus décider inconsciemment de la lâcher car il finit sur la voûte plantaire du pied droit. J'attendis un instant. Pas de douleur. Super!

Je pus faire le gazon de la première terrasse mais je dois attendre que Sam rentre de l'école -- ou que Monsieur Aubrun arrive avec le devis pour les travaux sur la maison, (!) -- pour faire ceux des autres terrasses. Je pense que ce n'est même pas la peine d'y penser pour la terrasse de la gloriette. La machine est simplement trop grande pour la taille des petits bouts de gazon qui s'y trouvent. Je crains que je n'arriverais à faire que du mal au rhododendron!

En fait, c'est un scarificateur mais on lui a donné un plus joli nom au catalogue.

Alors, j'attaque le ratissage de tout ce que la défeutreuse enleva du gazon sur la première terrasse, et ce qui me semble bien est que la scarification crée de la matière organique que je pourrai laisser sur la surface avec une couche de bonne terre de gazon quand je ressèmerai. Espérant que ce petit cadeau de plus assistera à rendre le sol plus accueillant pour mon gazon, qui pourra maintenant respirer, et que la pluie et les sels minéraux pourront pénétrer librement jusqu'aux racines comme promis par Kiloutou.

C'est promis, si cela ne me donne pas un résultat satisfaisant cette année, c'est bien le rotavator et un camion de 13 métres cube de la bonne terre, échantillion soumis, accepté et livraison inspecté avant acceptance car Sisyphe a d'autres pierres à pousser que ce fameux gazon.

....

Well, I am not so sure I think it is beautiful. Powerful, yes. It pulls me from one end of the lawn to the other. The only problem is that it weighs 52 kg, which is nearly as much as I weigh. Getting it out of the back of the BMW was a trick. The man at Kiloutou -- which sounds like what it means, "Qui loue tout," or "Who rents everything" -- went and found me a plank to lean up against the back of the car to roll it down. It was already an issue driving home because every time I downshifted, the scarifier rolled forward on the plank toward the headrests of the front seats, crashing into them, and then at acceleration, rolled back to the end of the car, the handle crashing into the rear window. I only needed that to happen once to decided it was preferable to dedicate the use of my right hand to holding the machine while I drove and shifted with the left hand.

When I pulled up by the gate, pulled the plank out from under the scarifier and leaned it up against the car, the next question was how to roll it down the nearly 45° incline without breaking my shins. I thought a minute and put one booted foot up against the scarifier as I pulled it to the edge of the rear end of the car. Once launched, there would be no turning back. I inched my foot down the plank toward the ground, using the left foot to brace myself against the momentum. Little by little, the machine lurched down the plank until I must have decided to risk everything and it wound up rolling down and onto the top of my instep. I waited a fraction of an instant. No pain. Okay!

I was able to do the top lawn, but I'll have to wait for Sam to get home -- or Monsieur Aubrun to arrive with the estimate for the house (oh no, Mr. Bill!) -- to do the lower lawns. Or until 2PM, when I can by law begin to make a lot of noise with garden machinery again (musn't disturb my neighbors' lunchtime peace and quiet -- sh! Eating), by which time I will perhaps have found a solution involving belts and the plank to getting it down the various runs of stairs. It isn't even worth thinking about trying to do the one on the gazebo terrace because the machine is just too big for those little bits of lawn. I'd probably end up tearing the bottom of the rhododendron to shreds.

And, actually, this machine is really a scarifier; they just gave it a prettier name in the catalog.

Now I am attacking raking up what the scarifier scarified, and what seems great is that the machine makes quite a bit of organic material, some of which I can leave along with some good topsoil when I overseed. I am hoping that this little present to the lawn will help enrich the soil, which should be able to breath now, the rain and mineral salts being able to easily penetrate down to the roots, as promised by Kiloutou, and make it more hospitable for good grass to grow.

If this doesn't give me the results -- the only results I will accept, becoming ever more the mad OCD scientist -- I promise I will rototill the whole thing under next season, with a truck load of sample submitted, accepted and inspected topsoil because Sisyphe has other stones besides this famous lawn to roll up this hill.

En réponse aux nombreuses plaintes des francophones

Saxifrage, primevère et bamboo
(au seul et bref moment de soleil ce soir)

Et bien, c'est vrai. J’avoue que j'ai une petite préjugée pour l’anglais. Il ne faut pas la prendre mal.

Honnêtement, je n’étais même pas certaine que vous visitiez ces pages, mais quelques-uns me disent qu’ils ont de mal avec l’anglais, et je ne veux surtout pas vous décourager de venir voir ce que je fais ici. Seulement, mon français est loin de la qualité de mon anglais. Personne n’aime s’immortaliser par de fautes d’orthographe et par une expression lourde et non gracieuse.

Alors, si j’ose écrire de temps en temps en français, il est en avalant mon orgueil et faisant comme je conseille à tous ceux qui n’osent pas ouvrir le bec pour faire la conversation avec ceux qui n’ont pas la chance de pouvoir s’exprimer dans « l’autre » langue.

Autre chose encore, en dehors de faute de temps, j’écrirais bien dans les deux langues chaque fois, mais j’ai une peur raisonnable de choquer les gens par une quantité de mots et une longueur de texte épouvantables et éprouvantes. Je me rends parfaitement compte qu’il y a ceux qui voient des paragraphes défilent sans fin et décrochent tout de suite, ayant une grande préférence pour la brévité. Je vous comprends. Quand on est appelé à écrire dans deux langues, on partage votre esprit.

En fin, c’est un acte de courage de mettre en exhibition sa maladresse avec les prépositions, et je suis de tout cœur avec Sam qui souffre quotidiennement à l’école. Vous êtes priés de partager avec enthousiasme vos encouragements et vos seules appréciations positives -- j’adore comment on appelle ceux-ci les « appréciations » sur les bulletins scolaires, bien que le plus souvent on n’apprécie pas de tout ce qui fait l’élève ! Quand vous trouverez quelque chose dont vous ne pourrez vous empêcher de corriger, ceci se fait par email le plus délicatement possible tellement je suis chose fragile.

Tu vois que je cache bien mon jeu.

Pas très bien ? Je sais. Je tacherai de faire mieux et garder le sourire courageux et généreux, rouge à lèvres rafraîchie, même quand je ne veux pas.

Hm, maybe not.

....

Que c’est sympa de gagner une heure de lumière de jour ce soir ! Seulement si on avait pu se coucher plus tôt hier pour vivre le changement d’heure en douceur.

A rose by any other name than Eric Tabarly

Eric Tabarly Roses

I just had to include this picture. I noticed yesterday, while I worked outside during the sunny bits of the day, that the four climbing Eric Tabarly roses are coming into bud! This afternoon, after I took the picture of the orange juice bottle of sand, silt and water, I turned to take a picture of a tight little bud, and what did I see?

This one, beginning to open. It is not even April, and it has not been especially spring-like. Just goes to show you the benefits of a south-facing wall. The roses seem happy so far this season, healthy leaves and new growth.

I replanted these four Eric Tabarlys last November, at the same time that I put the two new Queen Elizabeth hybrid tea roses I had delivered from David Austin Roses in England in at the ends of the lavender beds along the edge of the second terrace, to complete the row of hybrid teas there. The wrong sort of rose was planted at the right end, and the plant on the far end just never did that well. Since the Queen Elizabeth grows to up to 6' tall, it can go get the sun in a corner where it is overshadowed by a big, vigorous weeping rose and a spiraea.

The Eric Tabarlys hadn't grown as much as I had expected, their growth tailing off as the season went on, and they appeared a little "thin". They also tended to suffer chlorosis; a sure sign of too much calcium in the soil. When I planted them in the spring, I had removed quite a bit of chalk and horrible dirt, but it was likely that I hadn't dug deep enough. In November, I dug out pails of chunks of chalk, mixed lots of manure with the planting soil at their roots, gave them plenty of crushed bone and let them rest for the winter. One suffered a sort of shock and lost all of its lower leaves, which turned yellow almost overnight before dropping all at once, while the other three were just fine. The bush recovered. I decided not to touch it, leaving well enough alone, and it is still doing fine.

The house might crumble and lean at little more towards the terrace, but at least the roses are happy.

....

Let us hope that it will dry up towards May and June so that they have a chance against fungal diseases this year.

Soil conditions and grass seed 101

Soil -- pH 7 and sandy

Searching the Internet yesterday, I found some very helpful ideas on Bachman's Floral, Home & Garden site from Minneapolis/St. Paul. To see what kind of soil you have, get a quart bottle (liter in my case, but that is just fine in the garden terms of exactness), fill it half-full with soil dug up from your garden, fill the rest with water, add a teaspoon of Calgon "if you have it" (I bought some... not that I needed it in the end since it is for clay soil testing), and then

Put the lid on the jar and shake it energetically until everything is swirling around [gardener's can't stop being descriptive even when they are trying to be scientific]. Then set it aside and let it settle until the water clears. The sand particles are the heaviest and they will settle to the bottom within a few minutes. Within an hour or two, the silt will have formed the next layer. The fine clay particles will finally settle, but it may take a day or so. Organic matter may remain floating around on the top. Looking at the layers, you can now see, comparatively, how much sand, silt and clay make up your soil.

If the clay makes up most of the content, then you have heavy clay soil. If the elements are present in equal parts, you have medium, loamy soil, and if there is mostly sand, you can basically forget looking for clay, which is what I did after 10 minutes when most of the soil had settled into sand particles with some 30% silt. You can see the silt in the photo; it's the darker layer on top of the rest. Don't see much organic matter. How surprising.

For those of you interested, I will add a link for the soil drainage test, which you can read by clicking here.

So, what this means is that of the three conditions that are hostile to grass, but make moss very happy -- shade, clay soil, and lots of moisture -- clay is not my problem, which means that soil compaction is not either as far as grass is concerned. I dug my sample to nearly 10" deep, which is fine for grass roots to develop, and from having turned the soil over back in 2003, I know it is similar deeper down. Furthermore, other plants grow very well, so I am not as troubled by the deep soil conditions. Shade and moisture are my culprits. We can add two other conditions, low soil pH and low nutrient soil. Of these two, only low nutrient levels in the soil is a likely factor.

This leaves me with a few things to do.

Last year we pruned the two Linden trees, which we do every 2-3 years. They are very densely branched and large-leaved trees, creating two areas of solid shade that rotate slowly with the sun. I had cut out some of the lower main branches, but I can't go farther because being ornamental trees, they have been deliberately pruned to maintain a medium height over the years, and it is impossible to remove any of the lowest branches remaining without making them ridiculous. Consequently, I have to live with the shade.

Next, I looked more carefully at where the moss does not create as terrible a problem, and it is where I had put down the grass seed blend for shady areas. It is a mix of English ryegrass and red fescues, with the addition of paturin des bois, in the following ratios:

• 35% English ryegrass, Lolium perenne
  
• 15% Red fescue "gazonnante", "Chewings Red", "Chewings Fescue", Festuca rubra commutata
  
• 40% Red fescue "traçante", "Red Fescue", "Strong Creeping", Festuca rubra rubra
• 10% Paturin des Bois, Wood Bluegrass or Wood Meadow-grass, Poa nemoralis
  

The rustic blend I used on the second terrace with some success is similar, but lacking the Wood Meadow-grass and heavier on the ryegrass:

• 55% English ryegrass
• 40% Red fescue "traçante"
  
• 5% Red fescue "gazonnante"
  

Is it enough just to read the product names on the box that tell you for what conditions the mix is good? My online reading tells me that it is. The commercial suppliers do the work for you, but if you are anything like I am, then you want to know everything so that when it fails, you have a clue about what happened.

Each type of grass has its preferences, like any other plant, for soil type, drainage, exposition, and climate. In the case of grass, you can add use because some grass types tolerate being walked around on better than others.

In the most general terms, grass is distinguished into two groups, the coarse and the fine grasses, with perennial ryegrass, or English ryegrass, and the Wood Meadow-grass in the former category, and the fescues in the second.

Ryegrass
This grass is only there because of its ability to establish quickly while the slower germinating grasses, like the blues and the fescues, establish themselves. It doesn't last long, especially where it is very hot or cold, but it offers the following qualities and disadvantages, depending on your point of view:

• highly resistant to piétinement, your word of the day, a lovely word for "being walked about on"
• highly competitive for the first season or two, and then gives way to other grasses, like the red fescues.
  
• grows rapidly and abundantly, necessitating frequent mowing, up to twice a week
• demands cool, fertile soils with regular watering
• does not like drought conditions and heat
• finds its usefulness in large green spaces and sports fields, in a recommended dose of about 30% according to one source
  

The Fescues
These are considered by the same source as being especially interesting in nearly every region of France, which is good for me, but they are good in many parts of the States, too. They are, if you believe him, a sort of wonder grass:

• form a lawn fine, dense and compact, which we love and prize
  
• adapt to all soils and climates except the Midi and the Mediterranean (who cares! I am not there!)
• good grass for lawns and sports fields, large green areas, banks and ski slopes (under the snow)
• highly resistant to drought conditions, too much water and cold (my dream grass)
• tolerate shade well
• tolerate frequent and short mowing
• "delicate" establishment, rather slow, and grows rather little (fine by me)
• medium resistance to piétinement (off that lawn, kids!) and susceptible to disease
• good perennial grass (long lasting)

Between the two forms of fescue, the Chewings Fescue and the Creeping Strong, there are opposite qualities that suggest the need to use them in some proportion of mix, according to the conditions. The Creeping Strong produces rhizomes, which help it to reproduce quickly and, thus, rapidly fill bare areas, but it is a coarser grass that gives a less dense lawn. Nonetheless, while it also weathers the winter well, it doesn't turn straw-colored like the Chewings Fescue, and because of the horizontally creeping nature of its root development, it is less demanding about soil type, but this also explains its sensitivity to piétinement. It also has a nasty clumping habit, which flies in the face of my perfectly even emerald carpet mania. This depresses me about the shade mix, where it is 40% of the seed, but green grass is better than green moss, at least in this lawn.

The Wood Meadow-grass
For its part, like the ryegrasses, it is a coarse grass, and of the three types of Poas -- pratensis (meadow), nemoralis (wood) and trivialis (common) -- it is the least used. Its chief interest is its resistance to shade. It is a short, light green, fine-bladed grass, that when present in a mix makes a grass that contrasts fairly starkly with the fescue and ryegrass blends that do not contain it. I know because I used the shade mix with it in a shady corner, and you could really tell where it stopped and the rest began, although it is less obvious now that the rest of the grass has started to thin out. It also doesn't like being mowed, but that's fine because it's not the dominant grass in the mix. And, above all, sow before the trees leaf-out to give it some light by which to germinate.

This explains my rush right now... the Linden trees are getting ready to burst into leaf, and once the buds open, you can practically see those large leaves grow in size.

So, what is my conclusion? That I bought a big bag of the wrong grass seed! Oh well, I can use it to overseed the second terrace and the long-neglected lawn down by the pool, and I'll go buy more grass seed for shady areas.

The question that remains is, with my sandy soil conditions and lack of nutrients in the soil, to rototill or not to rototill?

I can try, at least for this year, using the power thatcher, and then topdressing with organic material and topsoil and see if that produces acceptable results.

Rototilling the whole thing under and then working 4" of mixed organic material and topsoil across the entire surface into the soil, fertilizing and reseeding would probably be my surest option.

....

Valuable Words of Wisdom
I include the following from Cornell's "Amending Sandy , Gravelly or Clayey Soils to Grow a Lawn". I know now what they are worth, having gone through what I have these last 5 seasons, and you will, too, once I tell that whole story.

Extreme care is needed when buying topsoil. There are no regulations about the actual content of topsoil [not in France either, I can assure you], hence many different materials are called topsoil in the landscape and building trades. Some "topsoils" have been found to contain excessive amounts of stones, clay, sand, wood, demolition debris, or other undesirable matter [we had it all, and then some, but when the adjunct mayor happened by when we were having it delivered -- 13 meters cubed of it -- he said, "Now that's nice topsoil!" Man doesn't know topsoil.]. Always inspect topsoil before you buy it. Insist on an accurate sample if you buy topsoil from someone who will deliver it for you. If a slightly moist sample of the topsoil seems adequate to make clay pots from, it is probably too high in clay. If it is extremely gritty, then it contains too much sand. Stones and other large debris should be apparent by visual inspection. If possible, be on-site when the topsoil is delivered, so that a load can be rejected if it is not the same as the sample material you previously inspected.

Amen.

It's the lawn conditions, stupid

"Moss in your lawn is an indication that turf is not growing well."
-- Bryophytes Science, Oregon State

"Doh"
-- Homer Simpson, and me

There are things that you know in your heart, but that are profoundly depressing to acknowledge. It isn't that moss is there for no reason. It's there because the conditions for the growth of healthy grass are compromised and moss grows where grass fails. The grass is failing.

It looked good last year. Everyone remarked on it, but it wasn't great. People are fundamentally kind, especially when they know you are trying hard.

The soil is compacted, alternately soggy (hence the presence of annual bluegrass, Poa annua, and the oxygen starvation of the roots) and then bone dry. I am sure the types of grass seed in the various mixes tried were not well-suited to the soil and the sorry conditions, and the Linden trees, if that is really what they are -- some guests swear they aren't, but I think they probably are, but of the large-leafed variety and more ornamentally pruned than most people are used to -- certainly make too dense a shade that moves in a wide sweep around the top terrace lawn.

These are the days when I want to just go rent a rototiller to just turn the whole thing over and be done with it.

Well, not really done with it, exactly. Put down more good lawn soil, fertilize and hopefully get the seed mixture right, install an automatic sprinkler system and water at 4 AM while I slumber. It would help if I could at least find the translation for "thatching" in French so I could see if I can find the rotary mower attachment that thatches the lawn. Then there is the machine that punches aeration holes in the soil. What on earth would Kiloutou call that?

Il souffit d'aller voir. I can't find the aerating machine, but the thatcher is a défeutreuse à gazon, or a lawn "defelter", and I can rent one for 75 euros. Hooray! I think I just might do that.

....

It's done. I can pick it up Saturday and return it Monday. Which leaves me Sunday, since I have to drive Sam to a tennis match or two on Saturday, but this way I get to have it for two days for the price of one!

....

In fact, I just checked and the grass mix that worked best on the second terrace last year was the "Gazon Rustique" that is 55% English ryegrass and 45% fescue, which is what is recommended for moss-prone lawns according to Washington State University Extension's "Moss Control in Lawns".

....

But, I just found this in a reply from Walter Reeves of the Home of The Georgia Gardener website at WalterReeves.com (italics mine):

Moss grows in a lawn because the environmental conditions in that area favor it -- and do not favor grass. What does moss like? Shade, clay soil and lots of moisture. What does grass hate? Shade, clay soil and lots of moisture. If you eliminate the three conditions that moss favors, the moss will disappear.When you next re-seed, add plenty of soil conditioner to the ground before rototilling it. Remove lower tree limbs that cause shade. Redirect water that flows across the fescue lawn. If you can accomplish that, the moss will be no obstacle for your grass.

It looks like a rototiller would have been my best bet!

Oh, Katie, I can hear you loud and clear! Feel free to weigh in on the rototiller versus la défeutreuse à gazon, thank you, and what on earth is soil conditioner? Does L'Oréal make it?

Anti-Mousse RADICAL

Sam walked through the open French door to the living room (and most of the rest of the main floor of this small house) this afternoon and shared his top concern with me, "Mom, the grass is turning yellow. Is that normal?"

"Yes, Sam," I chirped, not feeling anywhere near as confident as I wished to sound, "it is perfectly normal. That's what the bag says it will do, but it won't last."

When gardening looks like you are killing your lawn instead of helping it, and the brown patches are growing larger by the day, but the bag says, "Un jaunissement (yellowing) éventuel du gazon (grass) après application sera passager (will be temporary, not passenger) et sans conséquence."

Il faut bien y croire, or one must believe.

The product promises (Promises, Promises) to:

• Eliminate the moss that suffocates the lawn and makes it fragile.
• Contrary to iron sulfate, it prevents the regrowth of moss by correcting the acidity of the soil (good luck around here, we sit on chalk) that favors its development (hm... which way? Acid or basic?):
• It fortifies (all this sounds like a cereal box) your lawn and assures dense and vigorous grass (or a L'Oréal bottle of conditioning 2 in 1 shampoo).
  
• It doesn't stain paving stones, borders and terraces.

And it goes on to reassure me that la mousse noircie (blackened... oh?) "will be pulled out with a rake or a scarifier and the large naked surfaces will be replanted with grass seed." It sounds like both an order, and not counsel, and a spot-on prediction of my situation. Again! I feel like Charlie Brown, "Argh."

From the description, you would think that the moss will come up with ease, but what it doesn't say, and that I know perfectly well from past years' experiences, is that raking will require every bit of strength you possess in your arms and lateral abdominal muscles. It doesn't give up easily, this mousse. It digs in its little moss claws and hangs on for all it's worth, and the grass yellows long before the moss turns black in moss death. I can hear one reader telling me to embrace my moss, if that is what wants to grow, and another suggesting that I turn my lawn into an opportunity for a moss garden. No. Not here. Not ever.

Reading the bag again, to be sure I didn't miss anything important the first ten times I read it, I find:

VOTRE PELOUSE EST FORTEMENT ENVAHIE DE MOUSSE:
Dans ce cas la première application ne sera vraisemblablement (I love it! "in all likelihood") pas suffisante pour éviter une repousse partielle (try a repousse complète) l'année suivante. Cependent (However), à chaque application, la mousse sera moins abondante jusqu'à sa disparition définitive (How many years?!)

I must have forgotten that. Easily done when there has been no noticeable diminution of the regrowth of the moss!

AUUUUUGH! (thanks, Katherine), Charlie Brown.

....

I am still pulling up Poa annua, but there is much less of it this year. It was in the first seed mixes I used because it is a highly resistant grass, but it is also unsightly. Better in a prairie where it belongs. The seed I am putting down this time does not contain any. It's the same one that I used on the second terrace last year, and I was happier with the results.

If I were making a lawn for a client, who wanted a lush and as close to perfect lawn as you could get, I would try harder to find where I can purchase the individual grains and have them mixed. What comes in the bags is a good range for most circumstances, but I am pretty sure that it is made more for their profit than for our benefit because most people in the mass commercial market just aren't that picky. Take our friends with the garden in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, she like her daisy weeds and clover in the middle of an enclosed city garden and gets upset when her husband says he really has to mow the lawn. I reassured her that nothing helps weeds return to a lawn better than regular mowing. This is perhaps the single most important element determining where I can take their garden now. It has to work with a centerpiece of weeds.

....

As for my taking to my bed yesterday, it was just a nasty 24-hour bug, thanks for asking, but Audouin didn't take any chances. He took to a spare bed, deciding he couldn't risk catching it from me!

We'll see if it wasn't already too late.

Taking on more than one can chew

"A garden needs its gardener, for it can do nothing on its own."
-- me

That was Sam when he was much littler, out raking for me in November 2003, before the big machine that digs trenches arrived. I don't know what I promised that time to get him to do that for me. Money hardly works nowadays. This photo accompanied a page from one of the two books I made to chronicle the work I had done in the garden from 2003 until last year, and on that page I wrote that "a garden needs its gardener, for it can do nothing on its own."

This remains, unfortunately, true.

Everyone who doesn't realize this wants a garden. Many sensible people who have given the matter consideration have not only rejected a garden, but a house, as well, straight out. I have tended to think of them as kindred souls to those who can say in perfect truth that they do not want children, but it is just as perfectly true that they are right -- you can't do and have it all. If you prefer spending your weekends visiting museum exhibits, antiquing or reading books, then you probably shouldn't have either a house, a garden or a kid. I give these people credit for knowing how to prioritize and make choices, both of which I resent in the extreme.

I realized sometime into my "gardening" labors that I wasn't going to be able to commute to Paris to a high-tech office producing cutting-edge Architecture and maintain my wisteria and obtain the perfect lawn. I was going to have a hard enough time taking care of the latter two devoting myself to them nearly full-time. If a choice had to be made, I was going to be a gardener. In retrospect, I should just have gone and hired one.

(Ha! No way. I hear some of you objecting, "But, then you would never have... this and that." Of course I shouldn't have, because this was my unforeseen destiny and my terrible yoke to bear -- learn the plants and make beautiful gardens with them, even if it kills you because you hate actually sitting down and doing anything premeditated and accepting the consequences.)

Then, some further time into the labor, I understood that if the garden were ever to become a place of beauty, I was going to have to learn how to make a garden. I am just now reading a book, L'esprit du jardin (the French don't capitalize every first letter of a major word of a book or article title, which is odd, but which has the benefit of saving them grappling with the question "Which words are important enough in this title to require capitalization?", and I have just discovered that there is no underline feature in the HTML of Blogspot) by Louis Benech, a book for which Amazon.co.uk graciously searched the planet for weeks and finally came up with a copy in Paris at 69 euros (ack) in which he tells the gentle reader in simple sentences how one goes about doing this.

At least the sentences are simple.

So, then, when you become a garden designer, you are in a tight pinch for it leaves little time for the gardening. What? You say you have no gardener?

Unless you forgo housecleaning and the preparation of meals.

I tried to make my garden a lovelier place, and I discovered that I didn't know nearly enough about the essential materials of the garden: the plants. Hence, I spent several weeks up to Christmas researching them with the help of Penelope Hobhouse's wonderful book Gertrude Jekyll on Gardening, in which Ms. Jekyll goes month by month through the garden, detailing what is flowering and sprouting leaves, what marries well together and what labors are advised. Thousands of plants are named, giving their favorite growing conditions and partnerings. Where the specific variety named by Ms. Jekyll is no longer in production, or Ms. Hobhouse thinks that a more recent one would have delighted her, she provides its name. My spreadsheet grew to some 400 to 500 plants, and I am not through the spring. Fortunately for me, there are more early season than late season plants.

What this really did was practically paralyze me with feelings of being overwhelmed by the possibilities and give me an even greater appreciation for the people who can reel off suggestions for plants in Latin and English (or French... and I need to be able to do it in all three) and know just the right thing for that place over there. Of course, what it also means is that as a garden designer, you have to make lots and lots of gardens so that you can get to use them all, or as many as possible, and then try and find time to go and admire them, see what works, what you love most. It is challenging.

And, now, it isn't even my garden that will benefit from my efforts. At least not first. Over time, as friends and family came here for lunch and saw the slow transformation of the garden from lost to quite a bit improved, it seemed natural to ask why I didn't do this professionally. Like I didn't already have enough to do. Ever polite and yearning recognition, I agreed enthusiastically. Yes! Why ever not?

Now I have my first unpaid commission, and my own grass is turning yellow where it isn't covered still in last autumn's fallen leaves (at the bottom of the garden, near the algae-filled pool). So, now I have lost my gardener, my garden has lost its designer before it even got one, and I have to get to work.

And Sisyphus... got sick

Sisyphe had to go back to bed with a stomachache, and everything that goes with that. She regrets the pause in transmission, but will be back du fond de son lit très rapidement.

....

Sisyphus had days when the rock just sat at the bottom, and waited.

An Arnolphe "précieusement ridicule"?

I don't read the critics before going to the theater, but sometimes I read them afterwards, when little nagging questions about the production pester me, like did it hit the right note? What would Molière have thought? From the little I can find online in newspapers like Le Figaro and L'Express, maybe I wasn't the only one to have a little bit of trouble hearing what was being said, and maybe the alexandrins were perhaps a little appuyés, notably in the prelude, which tends to sound like a recitation (although why you would write in them and not speak them is a little hard for me to understand), and just possibly director Jean-Pierre Vincent's take is trop comédie-excessive and Auteuil's Arnolphe under his direction too much the buffoon, too pathetic to be interesting. To know, I'd have to see these other interpretations of this petit-bourgeois noble, from Molière's -- it seems that Daniel Auteuil's bronze suit and the round hat are exact replicas of those worn by Molière in the role -- to those cataloged in Laurence Liban's piece in "Enquête Théâtre: Les répétitions de l'Ecole des Femmes" in L'Express:

"the gravité of Lucien Guitry in 1924, and the classicisme of Fernand Ledoux in 1935. After the war, the avant-garde productions, such as Antoine Vitez's with the young Didier Sandre alternate with more traditional visions, such as that of ventripotent [which means just what it sounds like, "one who has a big belly"; think Rabelasian] Jean Le Poulain. Dry and austere like Philippe Clévenot, round and unctuously flattering like Marcel Maréchal, or high-strung in the manner of Pierre Arditi or seductive in that of Jacques Weber, a woman like Coline Serreau, energetic like Jean-Paul Farré or the thunderous [tonitruant] style of Bruno Raffaelli, Arnolphe résiste à tout."

I am just not convinced that Molière intended us to identify with Arnolphe. It is a form of theater snobbery to want "dimensionality" and "subtlety" of Arnolphe. This is Molière. L'Ecole des Femmes (The School of Wives) is a farce. It satirizes and entertains -- another function of theater. One of my favorite ones. We laughed, which is what we went to do, even though one critic said that the audience did not break out in peals of laughter, seeming perhaps a little uncertain about this Arnolphe. I walked out of the theater repeating, "Je crève! J'enrage!", my fist curled to my entrails, where Arnolphe, Molière bringing his message home in one of Arnolphe's great temper tantrums, says he "warmed Agnès like a snake," just like I parroted "Oh my God, I think I'm going to be sick!" all the way home in the car at the age of 8 after seeing Promises, Promises.

I suspect that given the reaction to this piece in its time, Molière would have approved. Molière preferred tragedy, but his masterpieces include these farces. There is always un homme ridicule in these pieces, and this time he is the vehicule Molière creates to send up bourgeois male attitudes towards women and marriage. It was a daring piece, and eventually forbidden. Safer to play it broad in satire -- the ridiculous is, after all, ridicuous.

I am going to stand by my applause for Daniel Auteuil, along with the rest of the cast. I wish I could watch him do it again, and again.

....

As for the dinner review, the meat and the wine were red as anticipated, Filet de bœuf à la sauce béarnaise, and my Sole Meunière was the pale yellow of the clarified butter served in a little dish alongside. It was also outrageously expensive for a fish dish, but it isn't easy to find a real sole on your plate when you order it, often being replaced without warning by its understudy: flounder. I still cook better than most restaurants (most of us do), but it's the theater of dinner for which you pay, as well as for everyone else to do the work; the restaurant walls lined with mirrors and posters from plays, the enormous palms in plants on the bar and low walls, the heavy crimson drapes partially obscuring the view inside, and back outside, black-jacketed waiters whizzing past carrying platters of mussels, oysters, langoustines and everything else that clings to rocks and lies at the bottom of the water, plates of meat and vegetables, slices of foie gras and Sauternes gelée, bottles of Grand Cru Classe St. Emilion and maybe, sometimes, occasionally a Roederer's "Cristal" Brut Champagne at 240 euros a bottle.

The oysters, from the Quiberon in Brittany, were lovely, and the Lillet, so hard to find outside of the Gironde... let's just say I'd be perfectly happy to stay at the apératif all evening. Except for the oysters.

....

On view were several pairs of lifted and improved breasts. My son declared this distasteful. My husband agreed. More of the ridiculous! One woman's perma-tanned ones were on display in a plunging diaphanous Emilio Pucci style top, her Lady Godiva blond locks cut just short enough to emphasize what they failed to shield. Her 8 or 9 year old son had a perfect view as she leaned over to cut his meat for him, while he diligently plunged his gaze into his GameBoy screen. We felt confident that he will grow up to be very well adjusted.

Another woman -- a regular -- we had spotted sporting her own pair, returned as the restaurant emptied long after midnight, this time modestly attired in a down jacket, chatting on her cell phone with her chocolate Labrador puppy in tow. I couldn't help myself, I bent down and let him wriggle in my arms and teeth on my hand (Ha, I know where you thought that was going!).

"3 months?" I asked.

"Pile point," she beamed. Everyone loves a Lab, even people who pay too much attention to their breasts and make us, too.

Whatever happened to big diamonds?

....

Taking a birthday celebration hiatus

March 22, 1955

This is an important date. 53 years ago today, my parents-in-law, François and Colo, became parents with the birth of their first in Saigon, Audouin Georges Marie de Lanète David de Floris, named for a paternal uncle (and practically no one else in France) who was killed in the Second World War, his maternal grandfather, and nearly everyone in France, respectively. A career naval officer, my father-in-law commanded a river boat during the war in Indochina as did Senator John Kerry when the Americans took their turn in re-baptized Vietnam a decade later. They returned to France to have 7 more, Jean, Arnaud, Marie-Hélène, Pascal, Hugues, Anne Sophie and Quentin.

I complain a lot about my husband, but don't pay too much attention. I love him.

I took this picture of Audouin near the end of our 2-week tour of Corsica by motorcycle -- our BMW 1200 KLT -- in September 2004. After a first week under the burning Corsican sun in a cloudless sky, the clouds gathered, and it rained a bit our last three days, including a soaking rain our next to last night camping just outside Propriano. Hence, the rain gear and the rather weary head for our morning coffee. I still love this picture.

I have to go get ready to drive into Paris. He still doesn't know where we are going because Sam and I decided to keep the secret until we arrive, and he starts to figure it out, but we are taking him to see Daniel Auteuil in Molière's L'Ecole des Femmes au Théâtre de l'Odéon. It's been sold out for weeks and finishes its run next Saturday. Sam discovered that he loves Molière, who he ranks as superior to Shakespeare for comic theater -- but Sam sees no purpose for any other than comedy -- when I took him to see the Théâtre Régional des Pays de la Loire's production of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in Vernon . It was only Sam's second year here, I wasn't sure how he would handle the language of Molière, and he complained about going all the way to the theater, but he loved it. He sat leaning forward in his seat with his elbows on his knees, and, incredibly, often he laughed before the French.

Sam now owns every one of Molières plays in individual folios, "because they are easier to carry around and read, Mom." He has been talking about theater and film again lately, saying that he owes his personality to television (Arrested Development, Family Guy, Scrubs, The Office, etc., not American Idol and Laguna Beach). But, I am hors sujet.

After the theater, we are taking him for a late dinner at one of the last independently owned brasseries in Paris, Le Grand Colbert on the rue Vivienne, just behind the Palais Royal. A Lillet blanc, oysters and champagne sound good to me, but if I know Sam and Audouin, it will be medium rare and red, both the meat on the plate and the wine!

Well, not medium rare, the wine, but you understand...

....

Upside-down flowers

2003

If it was possible to know less than I did then, I'd truly be surprised. Going back through my archives of the first photographs of the garden, taken with an Aiptek digital camera my mother had given me one Christmas -- the only camera of a small collection of Nikons, Canons and a Minolta of Audouin's that actually worked -- to document the state in which I found this garden, looking for one to illustrate this page, I came across the filename "June 21 - the upside-down flower, second terrace". Wondering what I could have called an "upside-down flower", I looked more closely at the photo. The fuchsia plants. Palm smacks forehead with a laugh. Fuchsia magellanica, or hardy fuchsia. Not exactly a rare specimen among garden variety plants.

There are references in other file names to "the white-flowering bush"(Spiraea x vanhouttei), "the gorgeous, huge pink flower" (a peony flower about the size of your average dinner plate from a Paeonia suffruticosa, or the tree peony, that grows under the shelter of the spiraea), "white-flowering ground cover in the entry court" (Okay, I still don't know its name), or calling the Yews (Taxus baccata, the longest living plants in Europe, if you wish to know) at either side of the steps to the second terrace "cedars", and that I was still mistakingly calling the ones I tore out last June by the same name. It was Louis Benech, kind enough to agree to meet with me last November and offer me encouragement on my budding career as a garden designer (pun intended) who said, as though they were a very special plant, when he saw them in the books I had made documenting my work in the garden, "Ah, des Ifs."

Ifs, ifs, ifs.. c'est quoi ça en anglais un if...? Back home, I ran to the Internet to find out. Yews.

There are also "mystery" flowers and plants of all colors and types throughout the filenames.

All the previous gardens I had admired were painstakingly and expertly tended by the National Trust in England, Monuments Historiques in France, something similar in the States or those people who knew how to do this at home for themselves and join garden clubs. The plants sometimes had lovely little nameplates informing me of their names, as quickly forgotten as read. What bothered me was that some people knew what to write on those little metal plates and could purposefully hike across carefully chosen landscapes seeking plants they knew should be there and even find. Still more troubling to me were those who could head out for a walk in the woods, point to this and that, providing plant name, family, and more. Now, I had a garden in desperate need of care, and every day I drove past the local nursery and garden center, too intimidated to even drive through its gates. How could I possibly expose my ignorance to the staff? I must have imagined that only the initiated were permitted access to its aisles. That lasted a long time, until the day I simply had to buy grass seed somewhere.

Its strange, too, because all that time visiting gardens, or back in the class or two on garden design and color composition in the garden that I had taken as an architecture student, another desire had been forming, and sometimes it managed to work its way to my conscious and tell me that I wanted to know the plants. I wanted to be able to walk in the woods or the mountains, across a field or through a garden and call them by their names. Now I was going to need to.

....

I have lost the very first pictures I took, or perhaps they are on the rolls of film that sit in a little jewelry store bag in my room, waiting to be developed. I almost certainly took them that first day in April 2001. Standing there looking out over the fields, all I could see were the tops of the trees on the lower terraces, the tips of two cypress trees, the fluttering leaves of the top of a birch, a raggedy row of overgrown yews, a shaggy box hedge that looked like it hadn't had a haircut in years, dropping out of site under the phenomenally weighty wisteria. It was like discovering a secret garden, down each set of steps, there were hidden delights: weeping roses, a bench nestled in a bank of St. John's Wort, the gazebo looking out over the pool below.

Someone had given a lot of thought to making this garden. Who that person was is another secret the house and the garden will keep. To look at the neighboring properties, it had once merely tumbled haphazardly down from the house and the street, leveled from the chalk bluffs that border the Seine here, to the fields below. This person had laid out a series of terraces, linked by steps, offering several paths through the garden, some cut short, others leading farther on, points of departure and arrival marked by coupled evergreens, the cypresses, Cupressus sempervirens, and yews, organized in a slightly uneven symmetry around the central staircase, the fastest way down to the lower gates.

Each terrace made a separate place, an exterior room, in which to gather or to repose, from which to look out over another part of the garden. Someone with skill had known how to play with space and make what is really a small garden feel, through its various vantage points and views, its spatial organization, its possession and dominance of the view beyond, far more vast, but vaster still was the work. Happily, I didn't realize what it would mean. This is when ignorance is bliss, otherwise I might have brought in a garden care company and never have begun the work myself once it became mine -- because it very well had to become someone's -- with which to deal in my first spring here, 2003.

The garden

The house sits with its back to the street, offering nothing to the passerby but a blind wall with a single window up on the bedroom level landing. As you drive up the street toward it, two windows gaze out over the road leading out of the village, but no one's head turns. I remember the first time I came here, home before it was that. A man bringing his future wife to the house they would occupy, the one with so much history already. She didn't know it yet. She thought they would sell, find an apartment near Paris. She could see the collection of car and motorcycle keys on rings with the ones to the apartment and the mailbox in a shallow bowl on a table just inside the foyer. The rest was unimaginable because they hadn't looked at any apartments yet, but she also suspected that it was because it wasn't going to happen that way. It didn't.

It was April then, sunny and hot for the season. I was jet-lagged but brimming with hope and anticipation. I still thought I would be moving into the house in a couple of months, not another year. The drive from Roissy had seemed very, very long, but Audouin prefers the longer roads less traveled. He pointed to the side of the house whose two upper windows peer down into the street, like the house is watching who is coming and going below, and said, "That's the house." I looked through the car window and hm'ed considerately, and appreciatingly enough I hoped. I had been imagining a recent suburban tract house, although I have no idea why, and then I remembered that he had said that it was old, with very thick walls, and that it was yellow. He had said that it sat on the street, and that you enter it from the side, although no one ever does. That door is always closed, and the garbage and recycling bins sit under the protection of its little roof. It looked tired in the April sun.

We parked the old BX across the street, in front of the neighbor's house, and I got out, turning to squint back up at the side gable. Behind the ivy were traces of faded burgundy faux timber in plaster against the washed out stucco. There was an iron gate, chipped paint falling away to let the metal rust, and when he opened it and stood back for me to pass, I crossed the shaded little courtyard with the bins and stepped down into the terrace onto which the house opens, and I caught my breath. The view opened up out over a wheat field bordered in the near distance by a row of trees.

"The Seine is just beyond," Audouin offered helpfully. It was a beautiful, overgrown wreck of a garden. Then I turned and saw the dark-painted French windows and balcony stretching the length of the house. It was a beautiful ruin of a house. I remembered also that he had said that his heart had stopped when he first visited it, and he knew it was the house for which he had been searching. That might have been the moment that my ability to imagine our apartment failed.

....

The house sits on a plateau of chalk, dug from the cliff behind to form "the other side of the street" for the houses right under the cliff, some of which are partially troglodyte, or have garages that are. From the first terrace down to the field below is nearly 30 garden steps, or a story and a half. On either side there are the gardens belonging to the neighbors whose houses are across the street. In front of us is a field that as a flood and agricultural zone will never be built. We are saved from a "lotissement" -- or the groups of cheap tract houses on tiny lots that have become so prevalent, everywhere here -- below our house.

Immediately in front of the French door into the living room, there is a basin. When Audouin first lived here, it was still a fountain, complete with a three-tiered birdbath element surmounted by a plaster angel and offering fake stone benches at either side, from which to sit and watch the water fall. Aside from the aesthetic issue, there was just one other tiny problem; the pump for the fountain was so powerful that it was more like trying to relax and talk quietly beside the power dam just up the Seine from us. The water did not drip, it fell. You have to raise your voice still to be heard over it, which is very stressful and tiring. No one asks up to keep it on once they hear it.

Having decided that it was an eyesore, Audouin set out to destroy the fountain and replace it with grass, only having gotten as far as the removal of the angel and the top two-tiers of the fountain element, when it occurred to him that he had no idea how he was going to get rid of all the concrete that formed the basin itself. He carried the fake stone benches off to the gloriette, or gazebo, and the water sat in the basin until one day it came to him to put the goldfish from the bowl, which he found too sad a life for them, into the basin. They multiplied. Maybe they were happier. From there, it was only natural to begin to install water lilies, put the old stone sink he found down in the lower garden in and fill its basin with moss and grasses, take a bunch of reeds from his sister's home near Blois and put that in there, too. It became a marsh.

One day, looking up the frogs that live in it to see what kind they are (I think they are actually the common European water-loving, smooth-skinned toads Buffo), I read that if frogs or toads move into your basin, it means that a perfect ecosystem has been established. I felt very proud of Audouin.

If the garden sits on terraces, five of them, its theme is approximate symmetry and couplings with occasional accidents, but I wasn't thinking much about this in the earliest days. Mostly, all you could see was chaos. I can hear one reader thinking, "But, of course there is order in that chaos," and there was. But, that is our story, and for that, you will have to patienter un peu plus car j'ai des choses à faire aujourd'hui. I am having lunch with my first client -- brave and kind friends -- in my new career as a garden designer.

And there is another story to follow.

....

This is where the fun starts

What, I ask you, is better than pain multicéréale grillé et tartiné au beurre doux de Bretagne et au bon miel d'apiculteur? Ok, I am avoiding.

The pressure is on. The men finally show up to take a look at the house, the third outfit in the last year -- that's how long it takes me to get people to show up and how scarce labor is with all the houses that need work and the horrible little tract homes springing up like champignons -- and the bell sounds for the first round. Trust me, it's a lot easier to be the architect than the client, particularly if the client is married, where you get two points of view for the price of one and all the arguing you can stomach! I realized when Audouin walked through the door at 8:42 PM how pleasant it was to be home alone, Sam up in his room ("working, Mom") when his first words after a domestic kiss hello were, "Okay, ils sont venus? Qu'est-ce qu'ils ont dit?" Only I should have a right to know! Here's the thing, it's already hard enough to deal with all this, the vast, yawning space between all you want so badly to do and all (much less) you can afford to do, your own hopes and expectations, and then pile the frustration and irritation of conflicting points of view on top.

"Do you really want to hear about this right now, or maybe wait until a little later?"

"It can wait until dinner," Phew. I had bought another 20 minutes and pulled out the pistachios and the Knockando. "Besides," he added, "I have the taxes on the private practice due tomorrow, " and proceeded to lay out piles of paper and tax forms on the dining table; just the perfect preparation for a discussion of the contractors' recommendations and anticipated estimates.

However, I wasn't getting off the hook. Why is it that after 5 1/2 years of marriage I still fall in all the traps? It's in the detail; give as little as possible and understate dramatically should be the two reigning rules for presenting any project to your spouse. So, what do I do? I start out gushing to reassure him that this guy understands exactly how I want the stucco (chaux around here) mixed, pigmented and applied -- custom mixed with the pigment integrated for exactly the ocher we want, samples from which to chose, and hand-troweled! Isn't that wonderful?! A pregnant pause and then, "Okay, je voudrais juste dire, préliminairement -- " I stopped him right there. Foul!

"No, no. If you are saying it now, it isn't a preliminary remark at all; it's a comment in reply!"

"Mais je voudrais juste dire qu'avant de décider combien nous faisons sur la maison, il faut savoir qu'est-ce que nous faisons. Restons ou vendons-la?"

No fair! Referee! Ref!

In other words, before we decide how much money to spend, we need to decide whether we are staying or selling. Translation between the lines, "You have spent so much time complaining about this house from every angle imaginable -- location [too far from the highway, Paris, our friends and Sam's school and too close to his ex], the village [you can't even buy a baguette but you can spend the afternoon drinking at the bar and restaurant almost across the street that reopened a couple of years ago and the sad houses lined up along the empty street], the quality of the neighbors [let's just say that the lower classes are more romantic in Baudelaire and Hugo than in line at the local grocery store], and the house itself [too small, no storage, no room to which I can easily consign my step children and their friends, who are here while Sam's aren't -- I said I would try to be honest -- and still appear kind, and requiring an investment we don't really have available to make] -- so, decide, are we selling or staying, and you had better be happy with your decision!" You can hear the unspoken "Or else!" reverberate in the air.

There's no place to be like with your back up against a wall.

I tried like the Democrats in 1993 to table that discussion and make a brilliant presentation of all the wonderful things our home renovation would include, hoping to muster the votes for passage by The House of Spouse before he had time to scuttle it with objections, like the Republicans did with health care reform and government as we knew it in 1994. Big Wife, spend spend spend, pork barrel, the end of the modern economic system and prosperity as we know it!

It just wasn't fair. I argued. I can't say we should move when I haven't even had the chance to live in this house when it wasn't falling down around me -- some days, I find pieces of the balcony lying in the grass -- or the humidity in it molding my clothes. I have thrown so much away, water-stained and lichen-covered, but I console myself with the fact that it's outdated anyway. I might actually want to stay once it's nice here. Don't make me have to decide before I even get a chance to find out! And he accuses me of confusing the clarity of the argument when I say that Sam still has another year or two of lycée, and I don't know if it's better to look around at real estate within a reasonable distance from his school, or wait until we know what he is going to do afterwards and perhaps expand the options closer to Paris. That's just the pot calling the kettle black! All I want (all) is to fix the house up, do it a little justice, and see. Is that too much to ask? Besides, if we want to sell it, it needs to be fixed up for "curb appeal" so that someone will want to buy it for the best price the market can support and not feel automatically entitled to knock us down to rock bottom. Right?

And then there's the electricity. I detailed all the outlets that don't work. I told him I asked for a number for a typical wiring of each room, "But I can do that," he interjected.

"The ones you installed fall out of the walls, and I haven't been able to turn on that lamp in the living room for weeks."

"That's because..." and he continued to give me a lengthy and detailed explanation of the failures of the industry to produce wall outlets for solid masonry walls, lamenting, "everything now is made for hollow walls." Everything at LeRoy Merlin. I held my ground.

"Even if we sell, we have to provide wall outlets that work. Your needs are so basic it's ridiculous. One plug for the television set and then you will live on sliced saucisse sèche," he laughed despite himself because I was right on the money, "but anyone who needs to do the housework, wire the computer or prepare a meal is ill-served!" I carried that point, but I knew I had gone too far when I started talking about the bathroom.

That did it. I never should have mentioned the feasibility of putting a toilet in up there so that I won't have to go all the way downstairs, across the terra cotta tile floor (cold) to pee at night. It could only be worse if I had to go to an outhouse. Audouin does not agree. I have trained myself never to need to relieve myself from bedtime until waking.

"See? You don't need a toilet upstairs!"

I understand his concern about putting more into it than we can recover if we decide to sell, especially with the volatility of the real estate markets now, but it's just the tiniest bit mean-spirited. It was like when he used to say, "Really, I am all for you working, and we'll even move to Paris once you have a job, even if that is terrible for me, but you had better never complain or be unhappy about your choice." Like that amounts to support! I am supposed to visit a sampling of real estate agents now, when we finally have someone prepared to undertake the work in about a month, and probably only because the man's son tutors Sam in math, to find out whether we should do the work and how much to do just in case we decide to sell. Not like real estate agents tell the truth any more than contractors. Grump grump grump. I left him to his taxes and turned in with a book, and then I played possum in the morning when he leaned down to kiss me good-bye and wish me a nice day. I wasn't having any of it.

"Tu fais la tête?" He seemed genuinely surprised. Optimist or thick-headed? I was going to be as parsimonious with my words as he is with the budget and his consideration. Five and a half years I have lived in this decaying "old home with charm and potential". It's my time. I nodded. I was pouting.

"But, we agree on almost everything!" Almost is the key word. "We agree that the outside needs to be done," but he said maybe the cheaper way using premixed chaux and then painting it to make it ocher, "and refurbishing the windows and balconies, and insulating the inside of the wall and," here his voice became noticeably weaker, "redo the plaster. It's just the bathroom."

Come to think of it, maybe I am winning this one.

I hardly know what to say

except that had I known what the response would be to my launching this Blog, I would have done it 5 years ago (and every day since). It was always the encouragement that I got from you that not only kept me going when it seemed I'd never get myself out of that into which I had gotten myself, but kept me writing to you to tell you about my travails. (I got some French in there without even leaving English!). I have also discovered that sharing with my friends is not as selfish as I thought it must seem (me me me, I am writing to you you you about me me me), because what it really does is lead to exchange. Actually, I have never heard anyone be accused of being selfish for sharing with their friends. Let's say self-centered for bringing attention to oneself. I would never have heard the things so many of you who received the link to "The Sisyphus Journals" yesterday told me had I not written. I felt so grateful to you for reading me and then taking the time to tell me your own stories or your response. As someone else said, there are some other Blogs that need to start. Who would have thought that the Internet would bring us back to writing to communicate directly with other people, and caring about how we write?

My own heart swelled ten sizes that day.

Now, as for the suggestion that I include my old garden updates as posts and then backdate them to catch up with today, I think that I will merely sprinkle them in among today's musings and tales, with dates provided for historical accuracy, and treat them as part of today's ongoing great slog forward. It's easier than learning how to backdate posts. No, I'm just kidding. It's historically more honest.

Also, there was a complaint that all I do is talk about my garden and that I do it en anglais dans "ces mails auxquels [on] ne comprend rien!!!!!!!!!!!!!" There were more exclamation points, but it's hard to count them. My finger is too big. Je te rassure, je parlerai de "moi et de ma petite famille". That's sort of a little bit obliquely the point of all of this. I leave nothing out. Et, je ferai des efforts (promis) de le faire de temps en temps en français, ce que je parle couramment et beaucoup (surtout) mais mal!

And so, moving on...

I have long-since discovered that there are two essential things that are necessary to progress in any building or garden project. The first is money. The second is the ability to commit to a decision. There is a third, unfortunately, and that's the ability to have an idea worthy of your imaginings, or at least just like all that great stuff out there that other people have done, but that you must not copy or forever know it wasn't your work and you must not bathe in the glow of the compliments, as nice as it would feel. The third is really part of the second; if you know you have a good idea, it's considerably easier to commit to it.

Giving up on money, which eludes me, and -- God only knows -- my husband, I am going to dedicate myself to the development of ideas, figuring that if I can rally enough concentration -- there will be quiet times when I am not allowed to write, and I have to sit and draw (pout) -- I will at last access that previously inaccessible realm of my creative genius (Sh!), or at long last and least settle for getting the green side up and taking pride in nice thick weeds, squinting to make them look just like the emerald carpet of perfectly green and uniform blades of grass for which I have longed and labored. Some of you know perfectly well from whence Sisyphus comes.

And, to answer another question, oui, cela corresponde à ma philosophie de vie, developed through all those long hours of toil, all those tons of rock I extracted from our soil and carried to the dump, all the time that this labor of the body and hands allowed for reflection and the turning of the mind's little wheels, and the years of thinking about family and stepfamily, love and the absence of it, hate and resentment and the abundance of that. But don't despair, for I have not yet succumbed. Remember, hope and love spring eternal and nowhere is that more apparent than in one's garden. And if hope fails, you can always pull a plant out and start over! People, too.

Remember, one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I have to go get the house a little bit presentable. People are actually coming to prepare an estimate for the renovations and work might even begin soon on this poor wreck of a house.

"La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux."

Realization of the Absurd

6 years. I should have started before. There is so much on which to catch up. More pressure, like where to start when the start is long past? This was the tale of a garden gone to hell and its recovery. Along the way, it became more, like so many great efforts that seem to become glyphs referring to the other things one isn't quite up to addressing yet -- like the stepfamily you made that you were so sure you were going to succeed brilliantly at blending harmoniously, which turned out to be way beyond your human abilities and capacity for niceness -- a way to redirect the energy that gets all bottled up and frustrated behind the things you cannot change, channeling it into the things that no one else even wants to touch, carving out your sphere of control alongside the things it is better to leave to your husband (who you are so sure is flawed and inept), as much as this is torture (and probably not a really good idea), for all the things that are really just bigger than you can manage and require you to hang on when you don't remember why you are anymore.

Except that in the garden, no matter how much you bungle it up, it does get better rather than worse, the buds and early blooms reappear on the sticks of the shrubs and trees in the muddiness of March, and the stems push up out of the ground to offer their flowers to the warmth of the sun behind those low-hanging clouds spitting more rain, opening occasionally to light the garden and fields beyond and reveal their glory. You suspect you can manage another winter after this reward for the last one survived. The least you can do is thank the plants.

When I started, I knew nothing. Now, I know enough to really understand that this was true and start to figure out what to do about what I have done. I suppose that is progress of a sort. The realization of the absurd will continue, at least for another year.

Come take a seat, have a glass of whatever it is you are drinking and keep me company with the cats and the dogs, the frogs and the fish, the toads and the butterflies while I labor on and try to learn how to make something of which I can be finally proud.