Today I’m driving up to the Aubonne Valley National Arboretum in Switzerland. It’s a large park situated in a valley between mountains and the vineyards of Lake Geneva’s northwestern shore. The last time we were there, many years ago, the manager of the arboretum kindly gave us a tour. Once he found out I was from California, he took us by the sequoias he himself had planted twenty-five years earlier. I’ll go have a look and see what an extra decade of growth has done for them. There are also the ‘groves of the past’, orchards that focus on heirloom fruits from Swiss history. With regards to this, the arboretum organization publishes the wonderfully named Atlas of Pomology. I’ll be guest-blogging on this more thoroughly at a later date over at my friend Catherine Nelson-Pollard’s blog, Living in Nyon.

And while it’s still too cold and grey to sit under any apple trees just quite yet, here’s a little breath of the summer apple trees to come.