Chenonceau – It has Heart

This was one of the first gardens that I visited in France.  My first trips took me to the Loire Valley, along with many other visitors to the chateaux that dot the country and line its rivers.  Although I’ve visited many other gardens in France with more horticultural interest, this is still a place where I return when I can.  It has heart.

For one thing, it has a lovely vegetable garden, which is not well visited, btw. If you look carefully, you may find artifacts of intensive gardening, for which the French deserve so much credit.  Many of my pictures were taken there, including the rampant flowers.  Probably for cutting.  Crafty products and flower arrangements are sold on the property. The Orangerie Restaurant is conveniently located near to the food gardens and I’ve enjoyed several really great meals on the patio, looking out over the lawns.

Another reason I may be soft on this place is the influence of women.  There are many other sources for its history but all of them agree about the powerful and influential women who held and nurtured the buildings and gardens.

 Note the pictures of the knot garden.  The knots appeared to be lavender, cut close.  That part of the garden was dressed in white that visit, with climbing white roses around the walls.

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Rose, the Woman and her Garden

I just read the book “Madame Toussaud”, by Michelle Moran; bear with me here for a short deviation from gardens.  Madame was an incredible woman, although she must have been all business first.  If the characterization is true, I’m sure that she would have been called “hard” and unfeminine by many, especially in her day.  I admire her for doing what was necessary.  Moving back and forth between the worlds of both royalty and revolutionaries, she survived her central role in the French revolution by making wax death masks of the executed.    When she could do so no longer, she was imprisoned.  I highly recommend this book as a very readable but historically accurate depiction of life and death during the French Revolution.  Winding back to the topic for this post, the book has her in prison, awaiting execution with as woman named Rose, who would later be known as Empress Josephine, or Josephine Bonnaparte.

Rose is another self-made woman from that era who was often described as being pragmatic, at best.  Rose’s first husband from an arranged and failed marriage was executed, but after Robespierre’s execution, the prisons were opened and she survived to live on her wits and highly placed friends, until she married Napoleon.  My mind is still open but it’s impossible for me to tell, from hundreds of years away, whether her contributions to the science of botany and her ambitious plant collections were a sign of a serious and capable woman, or symptomatic of leftover imperialistic ideals.

Whatever values they reflect in the woman, history does tell us of her successes.  In a day when people were scouring the globe to bring home the new and novel, for study or the amusement of their friends, she amassed a small menagerie and a garden full of exotic plants at Malmaison, where she continued to live after her divorce from Napoleon. Roses were a favorite and she’s reported to have collected hundreds of varieties, helping to establish a source of breeding stock for early hybridizing efforts. She employed the premier garden designers and botanists of her time.  Her gardens were immortalized in books and in paintings.  The painter Redoubt captured hundreds of her roses alone, and was influential in having them converted to printed media.

After her death in 1814, through neglect and the influence of war, the gardens were destroyed.  The Chateau has been restored as a museum to Bonaparte and the gardens, a restored wisp, a memory, a small fragment of their former glory can be seen today at Chateau Malmaison in a Rueil, a close-in suburb of Paris. It’s a chance to touch her spirit, even if time has diminished the impact. The pictures were taken in 2003.

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Out and In

garden bed with glass covered mache
garden bed with glass covered mache

Although we’ve had warm weather off and on, it only served to pack the snow tightly to make it harder to melt on warm days like yesterday. 

mache
mache

Dry steps from the deck let me get to the garden to see if the mache was showing any growth and it was not.  Friend Margaret thinks it’s a problem with the variety and recommends “Vit”.  I think I’ve tried it with the same results but may try it again next year to be sure.

Lifted the glass to remove the snow.  A little more light can’t hurt.  Not that there IS a lot of light.  This time of year our warm days come from the south and are usually overcast.

letting in the sun
letting in the sun

Inside, under the lights, I’m finding that the pea shoots, harvested as baby greens will put out a second growth.  Probably not as robust as the first, but still another serving for me.

You can see a bit of my passive humidifier, water over glass stones.  It doesn’t work terribly well in the cool basement but better than nothing.

pea shoots under LEDs
pea shoots under LEDs