On my ramblings!

While in Italy, well, Riva del Garda to be exact, earlier last year, I spent a lot of time just wandering round the back streets of the town and the peaceful outlying country lanes - well away from the tourist throngs. The rest of the family were doing much more adventurous stuff - mountain biking, wind surfing and grappling up the nearest gigantic rocky outcrops on the via ferrata. I did go up one of these mountains, but only to the cafe and up a very well-trodden path!
The views over Lake Garda were incredible and I was sorely tempted to carry on up the mountain but I met a couple of Irish ladies and we got into conversation and slowly ambled our way down the hillside deep in gay chatter!! How the Celts love to gas….. it was good hwyl or craic as the Irish say.

As a keen gardener I am always most interested in plants and plantings and I had great joy in discovering these hidden treasures (tiny though they were mostly) and was surprised at the amount of cacti I came across everywhere there. Somehow it wasn’t quite what I would have expected of everyday Italian gardens – something more operatic and vivid maybe – lavish lush colours, a glorious overabundance and not these crisp rather modern arrangements.

Some of the gardens were mostly cacti and elsewhere they were used as a feature. I imagine in their climate you can leave them out in pots all year round? I did manage to get the odd blossom to appear but my mother-in-law (Valerie) achieved a magnificient 7 blooms on one of her cacti this summer. Amazing. Must have been quite a sight – though one has to be quite observant as each blossom only last a few days, a thing of truly ephemeral beauty.

Now the really interesting bit!! An astonishing gadget that we found in the local upmarket supermarket was wine-dispensing pumps - at first glance they looked just like ordinary petrol pumps but surprise, surprise – you just took along your own containers, choose the wine you want to buy and fill up! The machines displayed the quantity you had dispensed, the price per litre and your total costs etc..... bloody marvelous! 

 

Wish we had these in good old GB, save a lot of trips to the local co-op, waitrose, sainsbury....unfortunately for us we had no spare containers to fill up with and so never got to taste the local beverages except in bottled form. That sufficed though !

Where else on earth but Italy would you find wines delivered in such a practical manner – a part of everyday life like petrol ? Their pragmatism has to be admired really. Cheers!

Logs, logs and more logs!

It is said that Great Britain has the least density of forestry in Europe but on our travels we have marveled at the enormous great log piles found all over the continent and can only surmise that the continentals have been a lot more forward thinking than the British and have been busily replacing the logged crop of trees for generations.

The most amazingly interesting log pile was in Germany, Bavaria to be exact - and in the front of a very modest house!! There were 4 in total, and they almost dwarfed their surroundings - quite monumental in scale really and obviously a work of dedication and craftsmanship. Most people simply lay an elongated strip or two and then continuously pile up in neat rows to form a very decorous and functional stack, but not our industrious Bavarian - the stacks were beautifully domed at the top, tapered in elegantly and were braced with poles and wires to ensure stability in all weathers. Brilliant!

We have never seen anything the like of since but will keep on looking !

Another slightly more interesting pile was spotted in Alsace - this one was square, again in a modest garden, but definitely without the wow factor..... 

I remember one very sad and shocking occasion… as a child I had happy times going ‘nutting’ or as we would say in Welsh – hela cnau – with my mother, brother and aunty Netta on my grandparents farm where we lived at that time. The old woodlands were along the top and sides of a valley running down to a brisk stream at the bottom and to me at that time were a magical place for exploring and playing. Childhood is a wonderful thing.

We took along an old hessian animal feed sack and a few ancient walking sticks with which to reach up and hook down the nut clustered branches – what fun it was to ramble and discover the treasures of nature!! These hazelnuts were then stored until Christmas and brought out as a treat, were cracked open with great delight and munched with a mouthful of dried figs or dates. The shells were thrown onto the fire. Simply delicious.

Can you imagine my horror then a dozen or so years later on going to visit my uncle and aunt on the farm to discover that things had changed drastically !! My uncle had actually had a grant from the government to clear the woodlands and convert the land into extra grazing for the cows!! All that moss covered forest had simply disappeared and now there was grass…… that’s the sixties for you – progress? a very British slash and burn policy which thank goodness we are now reversing and actually encouraging farmers to plant hedges, forests etc…. phew….

Perhaps we’ll see a few monumental log piles here in Britain in the future ?