August 2018

Just a few minutes away from our house is a small steep-sided gorge - the Tobel, after which our part of Hombrechtikon is known.

At the northern end of the gorge is our local lake, Lützelsee, and from there flows a stream - the Tobelbach - which tumbles down a little waterfall and then later flows into Lake Zürich at Feldbach.

Of course the stream sometimes has more water in it, sometimes less. But this year’s spell of dry weather has caused the Tobelbach to dry up completely for the first time I can remember.

The worst of the drought is over, but it will take more that a few rains to start the stream flowing again, though. Lützelsee needs to fill up again before it can start to feed the Tobelbach again.

A month of July almost without rain left the grass at the sides of our roads dry and yellow. So it was a bit of a surprise to go out this morning and see the roadsides lined with these charming flowers.

They are called chicory flowers, which seems confusing, because we usually think of chicory as being either a coffee substitute or as a kind of crisp white salad. When I looked it up, I discovered that, amazingly, these three things basically come from different varieties of the same plant. The bitter root is roasted and ground to provide a kind of coffee when coffee beans are scarce. The blanched shoots provide a refreshing salad, also with a bitter twang.

But at the moment, these little flowers are adding a dash of refreshing colour to our parched roadsides.

Incidentally, the German name for chicory -Wegwarte - which you might translate as ’wayside watchman’, may refer to the way they line the edge of the path, like a series of watchful blue eyes.