The Flowering Year

People ask us when the best time to visit is, and we never quite know how to answer. The honest reply is that the Gers is never doing nothing.

The fields keep an ancient calendar here, and once you learn to read it, the year becomes a sequence of arrivals: each one brief, each one announcing the next. This is the calendar we live by at Séailles, written in flowers.

May, when the fields turn wild

Spring in the Gers arrives all at once, in full colour. Walk any field edge in May and you'll find red and orange poppies, scattered through the green like something spilled, and among them the purpley blue of bugle and violets. Look more closely, low down, and there are the strange and lovely ones: bee orchids, Ophrys apifera, whose flowers have evolved to mimic a female bee so exactly that the males come to court them. And the showstopper, rising hot pink out of the young wheat, we find wild gladiolus, Gladiolus italicus, a flower most people are astonished to learn grows wild at all.

Above it all, are the great sheets of acid yellow mustard and rape laid across hills still mottled with the fast moving shadows of scudding clouds. You don't have to go looking for any of this. It simply happens, at the side of every lane, verge and ditch, around every bend and over every hill. Beautiful moments, inviting you to slow down to notice.

Early June and the scent of tilleul

Then, almost overnight, the lime trees flower, and the whole property changes register. Tilleul, also known as linden or lime blossom, comes into bloom in early June, and you smell it before you see it: a honeyed, faintly green sweetness that hangs in the warm evening air and pulls every bee in the Gers up into the canopy. The trees audibly rumble with the hum of thousands.

This is one we harvest. For centuries in France, lime blossom has been dried for tisane: the gentle, calming tea you're handed at bedtime, or when nerves are frayed. We gather it by hand over a week or two, dry it in the shade, and keep it in jars for the winter. The act of picking it is as therapeutic as the tea itself: standing under a flowering lime, doing one slow thing with your hands while the bees work overhead. Some years we offer a herb walk to coincide with exactly this moment.

July and August, when the sunflowers turn

And then come the sunflowers, the image everyone carries of this part of France: whole valleys of tournesols densely pressed shoulder to shoulder, all facing the same way. Catch them late in the day when the low sun strikes them just so, and whole fields seem to capture the very essence of the sunlight itself, glowing in an awe-inspiring visual chorus. Catch them just before a summer storm, when dark purple clouds create the kind of contrast that makes the warm yellow shout its welcome. Catch them at dawn when the silver blue of morning sun streams in ribbons through the clouds and morning dew shimmers on the leaves and petals. This year they are early. The June we've just had was unseasonably warm, and our own fields are already in full bloom as I write this in late June, weeks ahead of the usual mid-July to August window. If you are here in high summer, they will not be hard to find.

A young sunflower is heliotropic, which means that through its growing weeks it tracks the sun across the sky each day, east to west, and turns back through the night to be ready for dawn. Stand in front of a field of them in the morning and you are looking at thousands of faces all turned the same direction, waiting for the sun. It is, if you let it be, a quiet lesson in attention.

By the time they're fully open the hay is already in. All across the Gers the meadows have been cut and rolled into great round golden wheels, left standing in the stubble to dry — the surest sign that summer has properly arrived.

August, sloes on the blackthorn

Late summer turns our walks productive. Along the hedgerows the blackthorn fruits, and from August the prunelles, sloe berries, begin to darken to that dusty blue-black. We pick them by the basketful, because sloes mean sloe gin, and sloe gin, or in this case, its Gascon cousin, sloe Armagnac, is one of the small ceremonies of the year here. It's a patient pleasure: you make it now and you don't taste it until the nights draw in. We pour it into champagne at Christmas and over vanilla ice cream the next summer. The hedgerow gives you the fruit; the waiting does the rest.

September and the vendange

September belongs to the grape. The harvest, or the vendange as it is referred to here, sweeps across Gascony, the vineyards full of pickers and picking machines, and the air sharp with the smell of fermenting fruit. In the weeks that follow, the wood smoke of the Armagnac stills lingers in the evening air across the Gers. This is a season of local parties around those Armagnac stills. Celebrations of harvest, earth and fire, and a return of the rains. This is the region and its people, exhaling after the long heat, gathering attention and resources inward. September is the month when you can taste the whole year at once, the scent and flavours of summer still in the air and on the plate, the first signs of autumn as the linden leaves start to fall, and the evening breezes begin to cool. There is a sense of relief, a job well done, and also an expectation of things to come.

Winter glory

You might think the show is over but in the bare months, if you are lucky, the surprise of the cold season is wild cyclamen, Cyclamen hederifolium, pushing showy pink flowers straight up through the grass when almost nothing else dares to.

We say if you are lucky for a reason. The wild boar know exactly where the cyclamen are, and they will root up a lawn overnight for the corms beneath. But some gardens are spared, and those lucky ones put on a display in the depths of winter that feels like a glorious secret being shared with only you.

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That is the year, more or less. It rarely runs exactly to schedule: this warm spring has hurried everything forward by a fortnight. The point of coming home to nature is that it doesn't keep our time, but rather it invites us into its own pace. One of the many quiet gifts of living somewhere like this is that the seasons become wonderful friends that you look out for and greet with joy.

Whenever you come, something will be in bloom, in fruit, or in seed. We invite you to come and explore it.