Why this Meadow
Pourquoi ai-je choisi cette prarie
Chemin des Myosotis, Crans-Sapins, 3963 Crans-Montana Route Lens Crans up from Blanche-Niege.
In the Autumn section are some July/August pictures of flowers quickly taken in an hour before sun set (see above). Sadly I am not a professional botanist and have not had the time to become an expert, so this is my best endeavours at identification and I am happy to take corrections or other countries names for them! The species are more speculative. I hope you find them as outstanding as I do, and happy to add to it.
As a child, I played in the river that ran along the fields in summer vacations. Having come from the desert, and then the African jungle the plants and fresh water were stunning and drew me back whenever I could find the time and energy to “re-energise”.
It was not until I ended up taking plant science at university and started to appreciate the adaption to the different niches, that I realised that, fields had not changed in other countries, they just had nothing like them. It was perhaps the beauty of the farming lands and that refreshing quality we had in Switzerland that drew my sister into agriculture and in particular cows!; yes a hard job for a woman. The visits and beauty had affected the main decisions in our lives.
Returning educated, older and wiser, I was even more stunned by what many take for granted. Then after a long break I returned to find the flowers that represented the alps to me, were being smothered by junipers. I was so sad I could not pictures of them; and finally I saw the field that gave my sister and I such inspiration with planning and up for sale, despite apartments being built all down the sides of the roads, and the massive non-stop building down the valley, once with little areas of village lights below, one mass of electricity at night, now it was this fields turn to be turned into concrete and sterilised grass, will the field come alive with cricket song in the night and birds in the morning?. The small forest trails we tripped along, had become gravelled – good for my elderly parents, but a loss of a fairy world that we had experienced as children.
In my last visit we walked far and wide to hunt out flowers in surrounding valleys, and on the last day as the sun set, we visited the field; and saw most of what we had walked miles to see all in one place. The field is lumpy and dumpy, representing multi-niche rich and varied habitats. Where the road travels down the side of the field, invasive plants are starting to establish themselves, maybe outside the cordoned off grazing area.
My great desire would be for the field to be saved and opened for others to see such beauty (clearly an interesting task to preserve and show simultaneously) – but I feel this might just be another epitaph and maybe a small record of what was.