Some flowers in the garrigue / Quelques fleurs en garrigue

It was a lovely clear sunny morning and from Montesquieu we could see Mont Canigou and the Pyrenees, the peaks still covered with snow.  / Il a fait beau et clair ce matin et de Montesquieu on a pu voir le Mont Canigou et les Pyrénées, leurs sommets couverts de neige.

Olive trees live for centuries and often the original tree has died while new young trees have grown up around the beautiful shapes of the hollow centre.  / Les oliviers vivent pour plusiers siècles et souvent l'arbre original est mort et des arbres nouveaux ont poussé autour les formes belles du centre creux.

In the garrigue, the scrubby vegetation that grows on uncultivated hills, this is the time of year when the plants flower before dying back during the dry summer.  /  Dans le garrigue, la végétation broussailleuse qui pousse sur les collines, les plantes fleurissent à cette saison avant de perdre leurs feuilles et leurs tiges pendant la sécheresse d'été.

I find the website http://www.maltawildplants.com/ very helpful when I'm trying to identify Mediterranean plants.  It is an incredible work by one man, Stephen Mifsud, who is cataloguing and describing the flowering plants which grow in Malta.  Many of these are common to the area all around the Mediterranean, so it is an extremely useful data base.

Today we saw / aujourd'hui on a vu:

Cistus albidus

Clustered sulla, Hedysarum glomeratum

Crimson pea, Lathyrus clymenum

Thyme and wild asparagus growing together. Le thym et les asperges sauvages ensemble.

Asphodelus albus

Aphyllanthes monspeliensis

Back at the garden, Lo Jardinièr finished making a new raised bed and planted out lettuce plants our nighbour had given us.  He made a wooden frame with some cast-off planks, put it on a patch of rough ground we haven't used before and filled it with a mixture of half compost and half soil.

Lo Jardinièr a construit une parterre pour les salades.