It didn't come as any surprise that Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, one of the gardens at the Chaumont International Garden Festival, was designed by a pair of Englishmen. The joke translates well into French though, and I could hear that the French family near us were amused. Read the designers' blurb if you want to know the full details of the gnomes' manifesto.
When we were at Chenonceau in August last year we agreed it was a bunfight, and you would REALLY have to want to see Chenonceau to brave the crowds, but Friday the 18th May was even more seriously crowded.
I would never say to people "don't go to Chenonceau" - it's an icon, and a deserving one at that. I would, however, say "avoid Chenonceau on a public holiday if you can".
Long term readers will remember the heart rending tale of Steve the Siberian Iris. He and Son of Steve were separated in the great move to France, with Son of Steve coming to Preuilly in the first round. Steve got to languish back in London until Simon could return with a van to pick up the rest of the plants. Sadly, Son of Steve failed to thrive in France and died quite soon after our arrival. Steve, on the other hand, has reliably delivered several deep purple blue flowers each year at this time.
Steve is now joined by some pale lavender tall bearded iris and some slightly different Siberians . The bearded rhizomes were given to me when we built our back garden terrace and I planted them along the bottom to disguise the concrete blocks. I was warned they would be bog standard, but I didn't mind what they turned out to be, because I have never met an iris I didn't like. They have flowered for the first time this year and are putting on a lovely show for beginners.
Susan
On Monday we began by going to the supermarket - a top destination for any tourist in a foreign country in my opinion. John is coeliac so menu planning for the week needed a bit of thought. (You can read his post about travelling in France here). SuperU is not very good for gluten free products, but I made some bread for him using one of Andrew Whitley's recipes from Bread Matters. I like experimenting with different flours, and gluten free ingredients such as chestnut and buckwheat flours are easily available in French supermarkets, so I had these on hand already.
Tuesday I had clients for an orchid walk, kindly referred to me by Sue of La Confiance gites. They were happy to have K&J tag along, and as a bonus I took everyone to a roadside site which is a mass of Carthusian Pinks at the moment, along with quite a few other plants of interest.
Wednesday was full on nature and we went to the Brenne. This area is one of the most important wetlands in France and becoming increasing popular with birdwatchers in particular. Preuilly is only just outside the Brenne, so it was an easy outing for us. At the Maison du Parc there was a Black-crowned Night Heron on the pond, Orioles in the trees and good views of Nightingales singing. Moving on to the Etang de la Mer Rouge, just round the corner from the visitor centre, we had the best of both worlds, with the lake on one side and oak woodland on the other. After backtracking for a nice lunch in the café we spent the afternoon concentrating on orchids - first at Rosnay common, and then at the Etang Vieux near Saulnay.
On Thursday we went up to Montrichard for lunch with Ken and Walt and Leon and Sue at La Villa (Ken wrote about it here). On the way we stopped off at Montpoupon and after a thoroughly convivial lunch we headed for Chenonceau and later Chateau Gaudrelle. Chenonceau was remarkably crowd free, especially compared to the week before, which was a public holiday, when it was packed to overflowing. At Chateau Gaudrelle John was able to talk technical with the winemakers, so even though he is a non-wine drinker he enjoyed the visit too. Kathy tried a range of wine and opted to buy a couple of bottles of the Réserve Personnelle, a very well balanced sweet white wine. This time she will be sure to put it in her hold luggage, after having the bottle of sherry she bought us in Spain confiscated at the airport!
Friday I had various domestic tasks to get done so they went off to visit Fontevraud, Villandry and La Chatonniere on their own. They came back very impressed by Fontevraud and by the Orangerie there, who had gluten free bread and made John a very nice sandwich. They admired Villandry, but were disappointed by La Chatonniere, which they said was looking rather unkempt. In the evening they took us to Jacky Dallais' La Promenade Michelin starred restaurant in nearby Le Petit-Pressigny. The staff there were reassuringly professional about John's dietary requirements and we had a jolly good time. Xavier, the sommelier, was chatty and the food was beautifully presented and very tasty. It is also incredibly good value and not in the least intimidating. If you want to try a truly 'fine dining' experience, this is definitely the place to go around here.
I looked to see if we have any photos of these trees pre-pruning, but we only have bits of them - they did tend to get into every photo taken, but not in their entirety.
Other, bigger, species are also known as manne and are popular with fisherman. These are primarily the big Ephemera spp, the most common of which is E. danica. The Ephemera spp emerge from May to September, peaking in late May, early June. Some years there are short spectacular episodes where there are massive numbers of adults on the rivers. Every year, just in case, a sign is posted on the bridge across the Vienne at Bonneuil Matours warning that the road might be slippery due to a mass of fat dead mayflies.
During their metamorphosis into adults they are very vulnerable to predators. Fish pursue the larvae as they mount towards the surface to transform and snap up the adults just before they make their first flight. In French the fish are engaged in gobage, a word that means crudely slurping sucking swallowing - in other words, gobbling. There is a school dining hall game here known as gobage de flamby which involves sucking out and swallowing whole the contents of a popular caramel flavoured dairy based dessert that comes in little individual pots. I think the mayfly emergence is the fishy equivalent! It's not just the fish enjoying the feast either - bats, dragonflies, martins, swifts and swallows, wagtails and spiders all benefit from gorging on this high calorie diet.
For most of her working life she designed jewellery and accessories for her great friend Yves Saint-Laurent. She was enormously influential in creating the look of the 1970s, with her flair for combining old and new, haute couture with opshop* chic and always in bright cheerful colours (black was only for when you were miserable) combined with chunky clanking jewellery.
The hooks were usually used for lifting sacks of grain into the attic: attics are a good place for grain as they are usually (assuming the roof is watertight) dry places. I am sure, though, that more adventurous types have lifted furniture to the upper story and in through a window using the hooks, rather than negotiating narrow staircases.
This is the first éolienne we have encountered where there was nothing to stop one climbing the stairs, so being a man of action I made a bold attempt to climb to the top. This was defeated by 51 1/2 years of common sense overcoming the urge to be a hero: the stays holding the ensemble upright weren't tight, and the swaying was becoming somewhat alarming.
A Duke of York moment - I was only
The pump house - you can see the
The makers plate
Last weekend we went to support our local disadvantaged yoof charity. They (that is the Foundation d'Auteuil) run a horticultural college in the nearby chateau of Verneuil-sur-Indre. We arrived a few minutes after they opened and by the time we got up to the greenhouse where all the bedding and vegetable seedlings were, it was packed to the gunwales.
We struggled our way around, choosing little plants and putting them in our box (we brought our own boxes, as we knew they run out very quickly). On our first round we concentrated on the important stuff - vegetables - so it was zucchini, melon, tomatoes, more tomatoes, a few more tomatoes and oh, do you think that will be enough, some more tomatoes, aubergines, basil, celery, rainbow chard, but no peppers or chillies. There just weren't any to be had - we assume it has been too cold and they haven't germinated or thrived, or got knocked by the frost in March.
As ever there were many anglos at the plant fair and I got chatting to the woman behind me in the queue to pay. To my considerable surprise her French companion looked at me and said she knew me! I was the Australian woman, wasn't I, and she had run into me in the bakers at St Hippolyte!! Amongst the crowd we encountered fellow bloggers and friends Tim and Pauline and Niall and Antoinette. We had arranged to meet Annie and Chris, and they had brought their friends Howard and Elizabeth. It was all very jolly. Oh and our neighbour Pierre-Yves was there and it felt like we were stopping to chat every few metres.
Once you've chosen your plants you approach one of the students on duty, who makes a list of what you've picked up so you can take it through to a cashier. 'Our' student turned out to be almost illiterate and really struggled with finding the names of the plants and writing them down. I helped by pointing at them on his master list and he got there in the end. I thought he coped really well under pressure. It must have been very challenging to have to do something like that in public. I hope he felt proud at the end of the day of how he had acquitted himself and I hope his profs noticed he had done well.
After lunch in the dining hall and collecting some seedlings that Annie had potted up for me, we came home and I got planting vegetables while Simon did window boxes.
It was descending fast, so it must have come down on the high fields behind the chateau.
Sexual deception as a means of achieving pollinization is exclusively known from certain orchid genera. I knew, theoretically, that our orchard should be a hot bed of sexual deception, but I had never seen it in action before.
Two of the species of orchids in the orchard are from the genus Ophrys. Species in this genus don't produce any nectar to attract and reward pollinating insects. Instead, the flowers have evolved to look like insects, and they exude a pheromone which tricks male bees into thinking the flowers are female bees. The male bee comes to the flower and engages in what the scientific papers refer to as pseudocopulation.
In practice, Bee Orchids, whilst they look like lovely furry bees, aren't very successful at attracting a 'mate'. Luckily for them, they are one of the few Ophrys who are not reliant on an insect partner and more often than not self-fertilize.
The Early Spider Orchids can also self-pollenize if really necessary, but although it is not commonly witnessed, there are significant numbers of records of Mining Bees acting as pollinators too.
'My' bee was only interested in the very newly opened flowers. Like many orchids, Early Spiders unfurl from the bud upside down and twist themselves around once fully open. The flower the bee chose was still upside down. Nico Vereecken's fantastic pictures of male bees and wasps 'mating' with Ophrys spp orchids show they have two styles - head first and abdomen first. The one I watched went for both positions!
La Chatonniere is a most picturesque garden, no matter what the season. Because of its setting, nestled down in a valley all on its own, the landscape is designed to be a series of terraces, giving you magnificent views over the carefully laid out and themed gardens.
They've obviously suffered a few losses over this last cold winter, with the Italian cypresses very burnt. Mme Azéroual, the head gardener's wife, said to me that they have lost quite a few of the clematis that were planted in amongst the roses on the pergolas.
Nevertheless, in mid May, after lots of rain, it is a sea of greens. In many ways it is a more successful garden than nearby Villandry in these circumstances. Because more of the planting is permanent, it doesn't have that sense of a work in progress that Villandry can have at this time of year.
If you are interested in knowing more about pigeonniers, Niall and Antoinette wrote an excellent post a while ago over on Chez Charnizay.
The males are pure white with jet black veins. Females are more ivory coloured and often quite transparent. Where you see one, you are likely to see several, as they are quite gregarious. Flowering blackberry patches are always a good place to encounter them, and they will be so busy sipping nectar that they are easy to photograph. I was very pleased on my May 2011 butterfly survey to count 17 of them and see them in 6 of my 10 transects. I haven't seen any this year, but they should be on the wing any day now.
We visit Pont de Ruan frequently, as it is on one of the scenic routes that we take clients on as we wend our way to or from Azay-le-Rideau. Over the last twelve months there has been a project to restore one of the mills on the Indre there and we have watched the progress with interest. Now it is virtually finished and the barriers are down. You can walk across a new passerelle to stand right in front of the pair of working water wheels.
It is such a picturesque spot we never tire of photographing it.
The local river technician is based in the mill house and has invited me to drop in whenever we are passing. He knows our local river technician and I am always happy to do a bit of networking with the nature conservation professionals in the area. I mentioned our concerns about the over enthusiastic riverbank vegetation clearing down our way and he indicated he has similar issues up on the Indre. He didn't go into details, but it is obviously something he wants to tackle. For him, the main problem is hollow trees used by bats being removed.
According to a notice on the mairie notice board, there is a proposal to build a small young offenders detention centre on the former haymeadows and adjoining old furniture factory site. It is within the town boundaries, so I am sure it will result in many objections before/if it goes ahead. I just hope that if it does eventuate it turns out to be the sort of inspirational place we can all be proud of, where young people genuinely get a second chance. I was talking about it to Martin, a long time reader of our blog who we have only just met in person. He comes from a large local family (his cousin designed our staircase) and his hope is that all the wood working and furniture making skills in this town can be put to good use. Martin's idea is that it would be nice if some sort of continuity could be maintained, by providing inter-generational mentoring and vocational training, giving the young inmates the opportunity to come out with a trade, along the lines of the horticultural training provided at the Chateau de Verneuil.
