seasons

“The country is, to use much-bruised words, startlingly beautiful. It changes colour with the seasons. In early spring, after the orchids and asphodels, it is mainly yellow with wood sorrel, but it can also be white with four-centimitre-wide white daisies containing intensely yellow centres, which makes them look like fried quail eggs, interspersed with concentrations of intensely orange-coloured flowers and blotches of blue borage. Guarded by the tall fennel flowers, clumps of all these plants gather together naturally into formal arrays that would conjure a smile from the most demanding of gardeners. In the summer and early autumn, after the corn has been cut and sagely stowed away, the colour is brown or burnt yellow as the earth’s rib-cage takes the sun: only the vineyards and olives are left to stagger on in the heat. In Winter, green and yellow take over, to be gashed at intervals where the tractor and plough have painted it red brown- for a few days before it stubbornly reverts to green.”

Extract from "Calatafimi: behind the Stone Walls of a Sicilian Town"