In Mireille's summer garden: Banana and fig tree, lemon, palm, quince, cypress, weeping willow, birch, Arizona cedar, Japanese cherry-blossom ... trees. Rosemary, roses, lavender, bougainvillea, fuchsia, lily of the valley, lilac, vine ... bushes and flowers. Finch, starling, blackbird, warbler, robin, wren, sparrow, magpie - birds. Dragonfly, frog, bees, wasps, hedgehog, serpent  - creepy things. Two lovely little ponds with cress, water lilies, iris.  A shaded terrace, with a little running fountain. Our Dalmatian Freckeli plays with Felix the cat.

We've now moved to a beautiful spot high above Lake Geneva, above winter's stratus haze. Mireille's garden is a beautiful memory, and so is Felix the cat, who passed away of old age some time ago.

At our refuge in the Swiss Valais mountains: Raw nature, genuine people, old history. From our chalet, a converted 300-year old goat-and-hey-shed, high mountains rise into the sky, snow covered into early summer. Suddenly, in mid May an intense sun - after an endlessly hesitating springtime - wakes nature into a summer orgy. No pesticides, fungicides, herbicides - and mountain pastures are not a monotonous, clinical green, they have space for thyme and sage, and for a multitude of insects, dragonflies, butterflies, beetles, bees, and snails, little rodents, the foxes, weasels, squirrels, and the many birds that feed, multiply and store energy for the long and cold winter. Until wild storms announce fall in early October - and soon nature retreats into hibernation once more.