November to January: long periods of warm rain, the latter very welcome but still…Very beautiful skies with ever changing clouds, but no cold up to February. Distinguished visitors: Gilles Clément, Ernst Zurcher and friends and the lunar photographer Grégoire Edouard…On November 16, our local natural regional park held a garden day about the range and number of gardens within its limits, a revelation to everyone present. (Journée des jardins pluriels des Monts d’Ardèche organized by the Parc naturel régional PNRMA. http://www.pnrma.fr A star speaker was gardener and writer Gilles Clément with whom I wrote two books some years ago. Our mutual friend the botanist Véronique Mure brought him for lunch the next day. He tried out my new piano and decided that the work room in the annex was the perfect place for a siesta, right under the shawl left here by Indian friends Aniket and Smruti Bhagwat a few years ago.
Patient Véronique, while Gilles gets ready for his nap.
Also in November, a marvellous week in Rome staying with Ida Tonini, a concert with Labeaume en musique with Philippe Forget staying here with his friend Anne Christine Taberlet. Two pianists stayed here too, Fabrice Boulanger who is also a composer, and his friend Morika Hofmann, both good company.
For lunch one day, Dr. Maureen Small, founder of the NIA dance movement in the Ardèche, with her friend Christopher and her sister Virginia Small, horticulturist, journalist and writer living in Milwaukee.
Rémi Leculier who helps in the garden, always good natured. 
Nerines, autumn flowering and seemingly impermeable to rain.
In December, a meeting on themes connected to agroecology and trees, organized by Miguel Neau and l’Association du Bois de Païolive around speark Ernst Zurcher, author of the exceptional book Les Arbres entre visible et invisible (Actes Sud)
Also present were Thierry Thevenin https://www.herbesdevie.com/ wiith two young associates Gaëlle Morel and Jean Daniel Suteau ; Lillian Ceballos apiculteur and herbalist; James Forest, historian of peasant baking and bread. Much talk late into the night and long walks in the Bois de Païolive. Many meals outdoors…
Lillian smoking, Ernst, Miguel and James still at the
table..
A magical moment: we went to the former bakery at Payzac destined to become a bistro, where the new owner showed us his old oven. James hoped that he might find a buyer for this. James explained to us how the ideal oven would have an egg shape for best convection, and Victorin, the owner, suggested he draw it in the dust on a table (the room is just about to undergo conversion). Ernst, specialist in cosmic plant relations, looked carefully and said, “that’s the shape of the cosmos” and explained he comparison. We all watched amazed.
Late December: visits from MIchel Pena, landscape architect of Paris, Nice and the ARdèche and creator of the Foundation PaysSages at l’Abbaye Roseland in Nice.
Photographer Grégoire Edouard came through in December, then stayed a while in January to experiment a technique developed by a English botanist in the nineteenth century, Anna Atkins, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Atkins then used also by Man Ray: called photogramme. Gregoire made his using the bright light of the full moon. The images are printed directly on paper forty years old that he found on E-bay, originating in the Ukraine. To keep them from curling, he placed each one between books in a big pile, topped by the marble doves Thomas and Marina Doxiadis brought from Paros in 2018.
Friends of Grégoire’s come to see where he works.
OTHER VISITS in January
Sophie Scellier of Labeaume en musique, to help prepare future meetings on the theme of Nature and Polyphony.
Juliette Mézenc, http://motmaquis.net/ a poet I heard reading in Les Vans. By chance, her childhood friend is Natacha Guillaumont whom I knew as a garden maker in Marseilles. She is now director of a landscape architecture school in Lausanne. Juliette and Natacha have a project together about immersion in landscape and I hope they will meet here to work on it.
Catherine and Jean-François Blanc,of the International Terraced Landscape Alliance. They are thinking of having meetings here also.
Marianne GEORGET of Conservatoire d’espaces naturels, who is beginning her detective work on the buried pipes at Rousselonge in hopes of restoring the hilltop reservoir, with the help of Jean Marc Rieu.
New neighbors: Gaëtan and Véronique who bought the sports room (dojo) with Françoise the former owner and her friend our postman Jean Marc. And then another neighbor, Gérard Chaurand who, I discover, is president of the private forest owners association both for the department and the region. https://www.fransylva.fr/et His aims are durable management and biodiversity. Good news for Rousselonge!
Spring seems already coming. Mimosa is late but forsythia is early… what to think? still moist and mild.