Nature in Dordogne – Homage aux Ronces

The are still pockets of land unexploitated & ‘in abandon’ ( ‘frisch’) here in the Dordogne. The birds love them, & so too the wild life & the hunters. ‘Les Ronces’ (brambles) grow in profusion in this particular pocket. It was a bright sunny early spring day & I even saw a pale clouded yellow fly by. Personally I love brambles, as they are vigorous & great colonisers. They shelter much fauna & quickly become impenetrable. I realise this runs contrary to the philosophy of ‘improvement’, of maximum rentability & land use, & ‘man over nature’. Gardens, not nature.I myself too have waged war against bramble patches. Burnt them, cut them, slashed them, poisoned them. etc. It’s a joke of mine that the english have strimmers, whilst the rest of the world have manly bush-cutters.

Whilst I painted this, I counted ten different types of birds. Here will no doubt be a great place to listen to nightingales. My village used to have nightingales up until only recently but alot of the hedgerows have been recently cut down & grubbed out. ‘remembrement’. They are now sadly less frequent, though they occasionally sing in my garden, where I now have a bramble patch.