Search result for "coprolith" yields a Finnish Death Metal band with their hit song "Garden of Grief" - hmmm...
In France we are tackling a little corner of the garden that was almost buried in ivy. It was also the place where the well-head had been stored, probably since the last war. The well-head has been replaced over the well-shaft, leaving behind an abrupt dent in the ground next to a stone trough; there is a rocky patch of earth rising behind it.
I stood and looked at the place for a long time, wondering how to make it lovely. The first thing was to see if any of the curious pieces of moss-covered rock could form part of a stony bed that would clothe the shady base of a recent, very straight wall and join the area to the patch of ground under the Norwegian maple, hazel trees and philadelphus.
Piers is the 3-D expert and I asked for his help. As we moved the rocks around, he picked up one shaped like a very large poo. 'A coprolith', he said decisively – 'fossilised dinosaur dung'. I could see now that the other interesting rocks are also fossils of various kinds, including a couple of pieces of fossilised tree.
This does actually make sense. The house was owned by André Leroi-Gourhan, an archaeologist, and palaeontologist, who stored some of the finds from a local archaeological dig here (the noted Grottes d'Arcy sur Cure - the college is named for him). Arlette, his wife, was a palynologist (specialist in fossilised pollen grains). Whether these fossils were surplus to requirement and discarded, given to his children for their education or just lost, we shall never know, but now they form an interesting part of the garden.
What do you plant in a place like this – shady, and scattered with large stones? We have snowdrops, violets, Iris foetidissima, harts tongue fern, acanthus and golden rod that are in the wrong places in the garden, so they get moved there. Helleborus and geranium macrorrhizum will complete the picture.
