Wednesday 2 April 2008

Signs of Spring


The soil around here may not give many clues to its origin. I feel I could count the number of stones in my fields on two hands (sorry to those with stony soils) and find myself occasionally bemoaning the fact when I haven’t got any suitable stones to repair my barn wall. However there are clues to the underlying bedrock and one of them is the lovely cowslip. At the moment, along with the beautiful Lady’s Smock it can be found decorating the roadside verges around here. Cowslip has a preference for well-drained chalky soils and it is a chalk and limestone base to the land here.

In the background you can see the run off from the storm that passed by just before I stopped to photograph the cowslip on my way back from Bergerac.

3 comments:

aims said...

That run off looks cold for some reason..is there snow around?

But the flower is very pretty!

Right at the moment I'm amazed I've been allowed to comment - blogger has not been letting me do that on mose of the blogs I have read this morning...

Glad to read that you will be meeting up with your sons this summer..I bet you're excited!

dND said...

It wasn't cold at all, around 16°C. I think it looks cold because it's murky due to it being a deluge from a thunderstorm.

And yes I'm really excited that I will probably have all three children here at the same time. I can't wait.

Stew said...

Cowslip or Primula are called primevère in french and I'm sure the word is linked to the latin for Spring
I have a pic at:
http://terrecuite.blogspot.com/2006/04/spring-has-sprung-ii.html

common french name for them is "coucou"