Shangri La and a nice discovery

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It’s very strange, but we seem to have our own little microclimate here. We are three quarters of the way through November, and yet today in the garden there have been quite a few butterflies and honey bees zooming around the tubs which I’ve tucked away in a sheltered spot. The cats have all been spread around, asleep in warm patches of sunshine, and the roses are still blooming happily.
Yesterday I went to take a carful of bulky rubbish (loft and cellar autumn clear-out) to the local rubbish station 10 kilometres away and just 200 metres higher up the mountain, and the roadsides were so frosted it looked as if snow had fallen, and I wished I’d put a jacket on. The man in charge had a brazier lit to keep warm, and was wearing a fur-lined lumberjack hat with earflaps as well as a great thick jacket, gloves and scarf. Friends a valley away can have a completely different set of weather conditions, and the rather general weather forecasts you can pull up on the computer are not a lot of use to us. From here, we can see across to neighbouring valleys, and can often see rain, or mist, or snow falling, or lightning displays, while we have mild, bright sunshine. Our daughter ‘phoned tonight, complaining of the freezing fog she is suffering down in Bologna, nearly at sea-level, while I was busy cleaning the kitchen with the windows wide open and the stove still unlit at 5.00p.m.. It doesn’t always work that way round, though.
All our garden trees except the fruit trees up in the “orchard” – a very grand name for 15 3-5 year old trees – are now leafless, and the vegetable beds are all neat and weedless and turned over for the coming frosts to do their work. The rockery is full of bulbs pushing their way through the leaves I haven’t got round to raking up yet, and now I am afraid I shall damage their leaves if I do. My very happy discovery today was made while I was cutting back what I thought was a summer jasmine, which tends to get out of control, climbing and winding round the handrail next to the very rough and rustic steps behind our summerhouse; the last of the leaves were barely hanging on in there, when I came to a patch that seemed more tenacious than the rest, and had a vaguely reddish tinge. I was about to cut it back, when I noticed a flash of colour – bright pink and orange. It was a single, rather mangled spindle berry. I have, unwittingly, after years of trying to germinate one, discovered that nature had done it for me. Euonymus europeaus! Hooray! I’ve always wanted one, and was thrilled to see Katarina’s blog about Moon River earlier this month with the beautiful photograph. Now I have one of my own! The growth is as yet quite modest, and I’m going to have to be careful not to root it out when I try to curb the exuberance of the jasmine (I think). Now, Do I mollycoddle it or do I treat it with contempt, and which treatment will make it thrive?

• 20 Nov, 2011
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