Buttercups and cows

I don't consider myself a particularly good photographer despite some people telling me that my work is good.  I think I am more of a journeyman snapper, although I do keep trying to improve the standard of my "work".  One thing I try to achieve is to take pictures that capture the spirit of the place being photographed.  Mind you, different people see places quite differently so when I look at a photograph I have taken, it probably tells me a completely different story to the one it tells somebody else.

(I'm really starting to waffle now and probably making no sense at all.)

Anyway, many years ago we - by which I mean the Old Bat, the three children and I - spent a holiday in Normandy.  We rented a cottage on a farm and I was delighted to see the old farmer and his equally old-looking wife take their three-legged stools and a bucket each into the pasture each afternoon.  There they would procede to milk their small herd of cows - by hand.  In the field.  And this was only about 35 years ago.  I did take several pictures with my trusty 35mm camera but they were on slide film and I haven't managed to find them for ages.  All the same, my memory is of pictures that positively scream of Normandy.  And I have been trying to replicate them for the past two or three years.  Well, not quite replicate since I doubt there is any French farmer these days peasant enough to milk in the field by hand.  So I would settle for the ideal substitute:  cows, preferably red, grazing in an orchard smothered in buttercups and with the trees in blossom.  Since this appears pretty well unachievable, I settled for red cows grazing in a field of buttercups without a fruit tree in sight.

I could almost have taken the picture in my garden yesterday.  If there had been cows around - which there weren't.  I had the buttercups.  Yes, they look great with their bright yellow flowers.  But do they have to crowd out my raspberries?  And the blackcurrant bush on the left of the picture?