Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

brittany

The Nottingham correspondent and I availed ourselves of the delights of the interweb to find a cheap weeks break anywhere in France, the end result has been a C16 mill cottage in Brittany for surprisingly little money. I have never been to Brittany before, but anywhere that combines apples, cider, and seafood has to be good.

One curious sight we keep encountering is the prevalence all over the area of monkey-puzzle trees, all of them more or less the same age, and not of the same shape of the ones I’ve seen growing in the UK. These ones are of a more compact shape, forming a sort of elongated oval; our researches have indicated that they are a separate cultivar, called Araucaria Imbricata (my researches now indicate that this is another name for the same cultivar, so I am none the wiser). We have managed to locate a few specimens in local garden centres, but nothing small and affordable as yet. The picture was snatched from the window of a speeding car, but is the best illustration we have been able to provide.
















Subsequent researches lead me to believe that the tree in question is actually the Bunya Bunya Pine, aka False Monkeypuzzle, Araucaria Bidwillii, a close relative, but a native of Australia rather than Chile. It also grows to a height of about 50m but has a more pinecone like shape and is slightly more tender (not an issue in the UK). I have ordered some seeds from my favourite seedspersons;

http://www.tradewindsfruit.com/

I guess we'll have to wait and see, this could take several years.

Our cottage has a visitor, a faithful, but rather smelly black Labrador, who is obviously overjoyed to have people in the cottage again. He’s well aware of the timetable to which holidaymakers conform, so presumably does Labrador business for the earlier part of the morning, before trotting down the hill to check on the progress of breakfast. He hangs around faithfully, sleeping on the doormat, until we make a move, and once a few sticks have been thrown, and we show signs of moving off, he trots back up the hill without looking back. In the last day, he has been joined by an apprentice, a much younger black Labrador, much less self-assured, and given to leaning. Second dog is more athletic, and gets up on his hindpaws to be sure that you know he is outside the cottage, he is equally malodorous though.
















The weather has been quite wet, but much warmer than the UK, cheese and food more than compensates for the moisture. Although we are surrounded by water pretty much on all sides, there is a bit of a duck trauma going on; we gain a mild pleasure from feeding the ducks, round here, although there is a perfectly suitable duck pond (in fact two and a semi-suitable patch of slow moving stream), there have been few duck related opportunities. This morning there was a mallard scunnering about on the lake, but strangely, when we ambled down to the lake with some stale bread, accompanied by two gun dogs, it took off for the hills.

posted by Lampy @ 4/01/2006 09:04:00 pm