Letter 07/01/1889 - by Vincent van Gogh

From the rapid yellowing of the wheat you can see that the sun can sometimes have considerable strength, but the fields at home are immeasurably more beautifully cultivated, more evenly than here, where the rocky ground is in many places unsuitable for most things. Here there are very beautiful fields with olive trees, which are a silvery gray-green, like pollard willows. Then the blue skies don't bore me.

You never see buckwheat and rape here, and on the whole there is perhaps less variety than at home. And I would really so much like to paint a buckwheat field in flower, or oilseed in bloom, or flax, but very likely I will find the opportunity for that later in Normandy or Brittany. Then, too, you never see those mossy roofs on barns or cottages here, as we have them at home, and also no oak coppices, no spurry, and no beech hedges with their red-brown leaves and whitish old trunks crossing each other. Nor any real heather and no birches, which used to be so beautiful in Nuenen.

However, what is beautiful in the South are the vineyards, but they are in the plains or on the hillsides. I have seen them and actually sent Theo a painting, where a vineyard was entirely purple, bright red and yellow and green and violet, like the Virginia creeper in Holland. I am just as pleased to see a vineyard as a field of wheat. And then the hills full of thyme and other aromatic plants are very beautiful here, and because of the clear skies you can see so much further from the heights than at home.