In the garden in Marseille

As everyone knows, my parents have a lovely garden but the thing is, it’s a garden that’s on a very steep slope and, as we’re in the south, it’s mainly bad quality earth and rocks. To be able to plant anything and have it grow, every single year they bring in tons of fresh high quality soil and fertilisers. The result is rather lovely in the spring time and before the summer heat sets in July and August. This year the garden also suffered a bit because of the strangely low winter temperatures.

I really love the fact that many of the plants are at different stages of growth, like the vine in the photo above. There are dark green leaves and fresh new light green leaves.

The middle tree (if you can that there are three of them in the main part of the photo) is "my" tree. My father helped me plant it when it was tiny, it came to about my knees, on my eighteenth birthday. It’s now about two and a half times taller than I am! It’s incredible what almost seven years will do.

The garden is a never-ending project, every single thing in there (dozen of terraces, dozens of meters of stairs, etc.) was done by my father. It’s his way of letting doing something to get his mind off work or to let his work ideas mature. I think it’s a necessary thing for people who work in research. For me it’s mainly working on new projects such as learning crazy new languages.