May 16

Finished May 29

Friends and Families ,

We have been in our little Franconian neighborhood a long time now, or so it seems. We are developing routines and patterns as, I suppose, everyone does. For us, in this time of year, a great part of the routine is to finally see the shift from winter into spring. Two of our favorite spring traditions are to go to the garden show at our neighbor's palace and to drive around looking at new crops sprouting in our farmer valley.

Every year, the "Faszination Garten" organization stages a few shows in our area including the original one, just across the street in the garden of Schloss Weissenstein. In past years, we have used the show to help us select some of the dozens of flowers, trees and yard-art we have installed around our house. This year, we had only a few specific needs identified, so we figured it would be easy.

On the walk up, Marianne spotted Gretel, our neighbor friend, and asked her to come along. Gretel has been in this valley for 70+ years and we routinely use her local gardening expertise, so it seemed a natural. Together we did our normal wandering and oohing and aahing. And laughing. Gretel's dialect is pretty strong and she does no English or even "high" German, but a lively, positive attitude conquers any language barrier.

This year, we needed plants for the newly finished area along the back wall of the barn. It's just three pots and a bit of rock garden. but it's hard to decide, no matter what. We ended up with two Japanese maples for one pair of the pots and nothing for the other one. Just couldn't decide. The little rock garden got a few little succulents. Hopefully, they can take over. We took a few pictures to show you.

After taking pictures at the garden show, we tried our luck with the spring fields around us. Every year at this time, the bright yellow fields of rape seed plants create a wonderful contrast with the greens of spring. We had hoped to have a sunny day for these pictures, but sun has not been very common this year, so our picturesare a bit darker than we would like, but they were fun to take, nonetheless.

At the end of the day, we came home, said hello to the little birds in our driveway, and settled in to regular activities. (For Marianne, that means a bit of painting. For me, that means these diaries!)

So, there it is. A small, local weekend. Next weekend, we travel to the Bodensee (Lake Constance), but that's another story.

John and Marianne