en hâte – a quick trot around

On a daily quick trot around the village I note the quite magnificent blossom this year on the amandier (almond trees) with scent that flowed through the air for tens of metres. And it looks as though smaller plants such as the native iris are coming to the flowering party too – this group I appreciate growing up from the footings of the lavoir building opposite L’Accalmie, the village B+B – this old ‘jardin’ area remains uncultivated but the existing plants don’t care – thank goodness . . .

. . . one of the many apertures of L’Accalmie is host to another almond – from here the view to the south takes in the statuesque horse chestnut.

St Pons la Calm is an unassuming village with housing and work buildings for the vignerons and their families and those working in the fields. The odd spaces are given over to the productive so a planting of olives is appropriate and entirely expected. Hopefully these open plots are not filled in. The flowers of the mimosas (Acacia dealbata) are just just petering out . . .

. . . but the abricots are at the starting blocks. The water tower, le Pont Roux remains a static calming landmark in the fields to the north of the village.

https://saint-pons-la-calm.fr/patrimoine/Pont-Roux_fichiers/pont_roux.htm

Just beside the tower and its associated ditch which morphs into a path, the seasonal notice and barrier goes up between March and July to protect the nursery habitat of the toads. The laces and toads are visible at close quarters but none today.

However the hoopoes are back.

Walking along the ridge of the Bois Nègre I spy what seems to be a mirage but, of course not, just sheets of plastic on the asperge humps . . .

. . . with a lonely orchis purpurea in the foreground but in reality, the verges and ditches are fully populated with them now.

Back home the top lawn is a matrix of violas, baby blue eyes, pink lewesia, alliums, muscari, trefoils, euphorbia, daisies and pissenlit so hence the choice of poem.

I can’t pretend to a golden parabola,

or to the downing of many pints

For making a magnificent water.

I can’t begin to write my name, no

Not even my pet name, in the snow:

Except in pointless unreadable script.

But I can print a stream of bubbles

into water with velocity

you’d have to call aesthetic.

I can shoot down a jet stream

so intense my body rises

a full forty feet and floats

on a bubble stem of grace

for just a few seconds

up there in the urban air. Jo Shapcott    Piss Flower