St.-Aignan-Sur-Cher

We live in a very small town in the Loir-et-Cher département, which is located in the region called le Centre. The population of our town is about 1,000 people. Next to us is the larger town of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, with a population of about 5,000.

A tourist map of St.-Aignan-sur-Cher.

This past Tuesday, we went into St.-Aignan for an evening drink with our guests from Normandy. It was a lot of fun sitting in a café in town and people watching. After our drinks, we took a short walk around town and snapped some photos.

And lucky (or not) for you, I'm going to post some of those photos over the next few days! This first one is a map of St.-Aignan. I couldn't take the picture straight-on because there was a huge shrub growing in front of the sign. Not very practical, eh?

Tournesols

Sunflowers. Summer is the time of year for sunflowers, and many of the farmers around our area plant whole fields of them. I believe that they're harvested for their seeds, which are processed to make oil. We use a lot of sunflower oil at our house.

It's really worth clicking on this photo to see it larger.

On Wednesday we were on our way to Vouvray to buy some wine and we passed several large fields of blooming sunflowers. Ken stopped the car so that I could snap a few photos. The flowers are a beautiful sight to see; fields full of brilliant yellow.

We notice that the farmers rotate their crops each year. One year they might plant sunflowers, the next corn, then colza, then maybe wheat or barley, and then back to sunflowers. And there are always some of each somewhere. It's a constantly changing show, year after year.

Acres and acres of sunflowers.

And while you might normally think of sunflowers as a Provençal crop in France (à la Van Gogh), they obviously do well up here in the Touraine region, too. In fact, like many of our neighbors, we planted a row of them in our garden. But ours haven't opened yet. I'll be sure to post pictures when they do.

And A Green Berry

I really have no idea what this is. I don't recall what the flowers looked like that preceded these berries. The fruit is a little less than a centimeter in diameter.

Green berries.

These don't seem to be as abundant as other things out around the vines. It doesn't look like anything that I've seen people eat, so I'm thinking that the birds and deer get them. Of course, I could be completely wrong.

They may turn red later in the season, or not. I know they're not groseilles because they're too big, not to mention that the groseille season is pretty much over now. So the mystery remains, unless one of you recognizes them.

Bastille Day Garden Tour

Something about holding the camera and pointing it towards me makes me look all puffy. Oh well. I can't complain. I'm still standing and able to move around, right? But enough about me. Here we go. This is what the vegetable garden is looking like right now:

How is your garden growing?

My Blackberry

Although I'm having trouble getting it to connect to the internet. Oh well. I may just have to eat it. But seriously, folks...

Blackberry blossoms with fruit forming.

The blackberries that grow wild out around the edges of the vineyards and woods are in full flower now. Some even have fruit beginning to ripen. Great food for birds, deer, and intrepid humans willing to brave the thorns and bugs to pick berries.

Oh, and today is la fête nationale, know to us Americans as Bastille Day, in France. Our town, like many others, held its fireworks display last night. It's the last day of a four-day weekend, unless you are a juillettiste and are still on vacation.

Pink Flowers

Here's another wildflower that is abundant in the vineyard during the summer months. And it's yet another wildflower whose name is unknown to me. The flowers close up overnight and re-open each morning.

Pink flowers opening in the morning light.

Our weather has taken a turn toward fall-like. It felt chilly the last few days and it's been very dry up until Sunday. We've been getting a flow from the northwest -- the North Atlantic -- that has chilled things down from the weeks-long heat of mid June.

High pressure is building up slowly from the south, but it's not yet strong enough to push the North Atlantic flow back up toward the British Isles and Scandinavia where it belongs. So here we sit, under the clouds. At least the temperatures are climbing back up. We're wearing shorts and t-shirts again.

This kind of weather is not unusual; it happens every year. The difference lies in how long it lasts.

Barbed Wire

Yellow daisy-like flowers grow in the fields all around us. They're very common. These are growing on the edge of what was once used as a horse and donkey paddock out behind our house. The barbed wire encloses the paddock.

Yellow daisy-like flowers with multiple flower heads.

When we first moved here, the paddock's owners kept a horse and a donkey there. One day the horse disappeared. A couple years later, the donkey was gone, too. But we still hear the donkey braying (is that what donkeys do?) in the distance, so they must have moved him closer to their house.

Now the paddock grows wild. In other words, it's not being grazed any more. Once in a while someone will mow it down, so there are no shrubs or trees encroaching. But it's full of wildflowers, like these, and that makes it beautiful all summer long.