Last Prunes

I noticed the prunes from a tree in front of the house were nice and ripe, so I plucked the few I could reach. To do this I use my home-made picking device, made from the bottom of a plastic bottle and attached to a long metal strip left over from something in the garage (which replaced a rather ugly extending curtain rod that had longer reach but has disappeared in the past).

The bottle base has slots cut in the sides, which allow a prune to be caught with its stem in the slot and then pulled off the branch. Works fine though a few do bounce back out and need to be found on the ground. My harvest was eight prunes in all; the only ones I could reach from the balcony. In the past we'd get dozens, also from the tree that's now gone, and the missus would make jam from them. These eight prunes we ate as such and were delicious.

prune - pruneau - pruim

Rooftop Birches

Decades ago I gave the chimney a fresh coat of exterior emulsion paint, got called away and forgot the pot on the roof. Without a lid as well. Some birch seeds fell into it and sprouted some small trees, two of which survive, as well as some moss. Fertile stuff, emulsion paint. To this day that pot is still on the roof, now with cracks and starting to crumble. Once the roof is finished, I'll find a proper, larger pot and give these birches a new home.

birch - bouleau - berk

Muddy Feet

Seen on the tarpaulin covering the roof: bird tracks that look decidedly muddy! 

Orange Dusk

The clouds in the sky have turned orange at the end of the day.

The same orange light appears to bounce off the clouds and give an orange tinge to everything on the ground as well. Never seen that before.

Crow's Nest

While up on the roof, I finally spotted the crow's nest in the large oak behind the house, which I hadn't been able to find before. 

crow - corbeau - kraai
oak - chêne - eik

Change of Colour

Our Japanese maple is sporting some bright red leaves. Not sure if these are new or if they're the first to change colour for Autumn. Lovely coloure, whatever the reason.

maple - érable - esdoorn - acer japonicum

 

Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness

The missus can't sit still so she's cleaning the kitchen windows. Lit from behind by the morning sun she's bathed in heavenly light!

Roof

I haven't mentioned our roof so far, which I'm insulating myself. Where i first got a number of quotes from various contractors before discovering I could get the materials from a specialised store for half of the cheapest quote. It's not very complicated work as such; it just takes a lot of time.

Above is how far I got things at the end of last summer: wooden border on the edge and some 280 foam blocks laid down. I'd used thin plastic film to keep the morning dew off everything and then covered the lot with some huge tarpaulins to wait for the return of warm and dry weather.

The plan had been to take a couple of weeks off from work this Spring and get it finished, but alas, the colleague who would meanwhile take care of my clients decided to leave the company thus leaving me with no backup. It took several months to find a replacement who then turned out less than ideal, so I'm now taking odd days off and every sunny weekend to continue.

I'd reached the stage of installing the seven lenghts of EPDM rubber cover but these are heavy. The idea was to hoist them onto the roof while folded double and rolled around a length of plastic rainpipe but that was undoable. 

My eldest is kind enough to lend a hand and today we both came up with the same idea - put the roll on some sort of supporting frame to hold the weight and then pull it off the roll onto the roof. My eldest thought of using parts from my student bed made from scaffolding and I then had it set up in no time.

As an update, we've laid the lengths of EPDM over several weekends and now it's just a matter of adding flashing strips as extra protection for the overlaps and then adding rubber sealer to the edges of those. Then attach everything round the wooden border, and then put up the aluminium trim. Still a lot to do but the heavy lifting is (literally) done!

 

Prune Jam

The missus was given a lot of prunes by a colleague at work, so she's made a batch of jam with them.
Her jam could even be lighter than air as shown by this pot below!

prune - pruneau - pruim

 

Further Flowers

Even this late in August, we still have flowers.

This Anemone is sprouting little white buds.

 

White Hydrangeas are going strong, in front of the shed and this one as well in front of the pergola.

These are Mirabilis which we bought at Aywiers. Several large bulbs have grown into a fairly sizable plant which is now producing white, magenta and yellow trumpets.

 

The purply flowers below I'll also have to identify.

anemone - anémone - anemoon
hydrangea - hortensia
mirabilis (four o'clock flower) - belle-de-nuit - nachtschone

Dry

Despite the odd shower, it's been another dry summer. The grass around the house has mostly died and the moss underneath is bone-dry. One of the hazel trees in the small bush behind the house is prematurely losing leaves because the larger trees behind it have deeper roots and drink the ground dry.

Slow Saturday Start

On the couch with coffee and the book I bought at Blackwell's. Bliss.

 

Teatime

To end the aftenoon we had tea on the front terrace, with a book and magazines. Tiger Hill Darjeeling this time, from the excellent tea shop in Wavre. I was allowed the last slice of hazelnut pie, which is a delicacy from our native The Hague. Yum!

hazelnut - noisette - hazelnoot

Further Feathers

My turn to find a striking feather, from a magpie's wing. It's almost graphic in its colouring. Below it's compared to other recently found examples, the grey ones from pigeons and the black one from a crow. Marvels of nature.

magpie - pie bavarde - ekster
pigeon - duif
crow - corbeau - kraai

Chestnuts Reaching for the Moon

Our neighbours' chestnut trees are growing another bumper crop by the looks of it - every branch sporting a good number of spiky balls. This morning it looked like they were growing towards the moon. Later in the day though,  the moon had moved and looked like it made a successful escape!

chestnut - châtaigne - kastanje

Hidden in the Foliage

A lot of rustling in the branches this morning meant another squirrel was passing by. But other than a glimpse it didn't show itself this time. 

Later in the day a magpie sat preening itself in a prune tree but also largely hidden from sight.

And just now (just before 10 pm), a small bat flew into the living room, presumably attracted by a lamp on the fireplace. Third time that's happened in the almost 30 years we've lived here. No foliage in this case but still no way of catching it in a photograph either unfortunately. So I switched off the light and opened wide the sliding window at the front. Where remaining daylight lured it back to the front of the living room and eventually out into the sky.

squirrel - écureuil - eekhoorn
magpie - pie bavarde - ekster
prune - pruneau - pruim
bat - chauve-souris - vleermuis

Belated Spring Cleaning

The missus spent quite some time rearranging the contents of my grandmother's linen closet, which we use to store our good china, crystal and my mother's silverware. Which got a good cleaning and now takes pride of place on the top shelf, shining in the light.

Flowers of the Moment

The red and pink roses have long wilted, and produced shiny red rosehips in abundance,

These white ones are still bravely soldiering on however. Another one in a pot by the kitchen is even producing a few new buds.

As is this purple shamrock, which is starting all over in growing stems with pretty pink flowers. The geraniums we got from my brother's missus are still in season and going strong. They've found a temporary home sitting undernath a larger plant by the kitchen.

purple shamrock - oxalis pourpre - klaverzuring

Fruity Fabrics

The missus has bought some fabric from her cousin's shop in The Hague when she was there for a few days. Little red cherries and cheerful lemon patterns, to which she pinned edging in red and green. Her mother kindly offered to sew them on and brought them back today so tea was made to inaugurate. Just the thing for our garden table!

cherry - cérise - kers
lemon - citron - citroen

Early Acorns

The large oak behind the house is starting to drop acorns. When they fall they rattle down the leaves like irregular percussion.

Quite a few still have their cup attached and a little stem as well. Recent gusts of wind will have helped. Amongst the acorns I also found a pair of hazelnuts, which were rather premature.

oak - chêne - eik
hazelnut - noisette - hazelnoot

 

Dreaming Spires and More

What a beautiful little city Oxford is; the "City of Dreaming Spires" as it's called. Filled with the beautiful architecture of renowned university buildings, colleges, libraries and museums. The centre is relatively small so you can walk everywhere in 10-15 minutes, there's excellent bus services and relatively few tourists. Above is the iconic Radcliffe Camera library building as seen from the University Church tower.

The High Street showing spires on churches and facades.

Treasures in the Ashmolean museum span millennia, from f ex a Babylonian story about the creation of the world in exquisitely fine cuneiform script, to a lovely pointillist view of Éragny and its church by Pissarro.

The Botanical Gardens are packed with a richness of plants and trees and are very well-maintained. They are bordered on one side by the river Cherwell, seen here passing under Magdalen Bridge and enjoyed by people on a variety of boats.

The terrace of a pub has screens to watch the cricket, where we saw the first match of the Hundred competition interrupted by a fox. It ran round the field two-three times before finding an escape route.

And we visited Blackwell's bookstore, where I'd ordered before online but was delighted to see it for real. Photo shows the rear of the basement. Above it are three more floors plus a second building two doors down. Literature lovers are spoiled for choice here.

I can fill this blog many times over with photographs I took while there, but the best thing you can do is discover Oxford for yourself. Recommended!

fox - renard - vos