Burgundy and on the Rhone and Saone Rivers

Day 14 Friday 17th Sept Dijon and Burgundy

We're off to Dijon today, home of mustard, Notre Dame Cathedral and La Chouette, the little owl whose head you have to rub with the left hand for good luck. David did it for me as I was off in Galeries Lafayette doing some shopping. It's an ultra-David Jones-type department store so the shopping was limited for my budget but I did buy David's birthday present. Tourists are down in Dijon this year and one lady reports a small jar of mustard for €20 (AU$40) and the shop-keeper saying it’s because there are no Americans travelling this year. There is a great market around the cathedral with wonderful displays of fish and huge piles of tiny green beans.

Our garden this afternoon is in the grounds of another old chateau with a beautiful potager (vegetable garden) and autumn colours, a secret garden containing raspberries – so secret that even the birds don’t seem to find them and rolling parklands containing magnificent old trees. As a special treat Merryle has arranged afternoon tea at a nearby auberge ‘L’Eire du Temps’, a pun on the owner being an Irish girl. She has forgotten how to make tea however and out comes the pot of hot water and a box of teabags. Excellent apricot tart.

Next stop is the Chateau Mersault for a wine tasting and tour of the ancient wine cellars. Ancient is right: some of them go back to the 12th century and weave around for miles, all lined with ranks of bottles of wine of varying ages. There must be a fortune in wine stored there. The tasting was of very young wines, rather disappointing, nothing to go into raptures over. This shows one of the barrel caves.

Back in Beaune and our last night in this lovely Hotel Le Ceps. It is very old but suitably updated with good plumbing and wi-fi for the computer in its lounge which are my basic needs for this trip. Our room is out the back under an arch, to the left in the photo very quiet. David thinks the magnificent willow must be about 300 years old.
Once again we prowl the streets in search of a nice dinner place: there is a choice of about thirty restaurants so it takes a while to read all the menus. I have snails and am sorry because they’re not as good as the first lot I had. During the night there is thunder, lightning and rain.

Day 15 to Lyon to catch M.V. Princesse de Provence

It’s raining as we leave Beaune but with typical luck by the time we get to the garden near Villefranche-sur-Saone it has stopped and sunshine is peeping through the clouds. M’sieur the owner is waiting for us and explains the array of small formal gardens each dedicated to a great woman like Empress Josephine and Coco Chanel. I particularly like Gertrude Jekyll and we all enjoy that there are more roses still in bloom than we’ve seen before. There are magnificent big old trees all over the park but Bill and David are particularly taken with a tiny Wollemi Pine looking quite overshadowed by its neighbours.

This is the last picnic lunch from the bus. Al fresco lunch is a special feature of Merryle’s tours and is terrific, as Lucy and Fab do a wonderful job of finding local delicacies and making delicious different salads. Lucy is not only a top translator and fund of history but an expert saladier.

Waiting at the wharf in Lyon is our cruise ship the MV Princesse de Provence, a big flat vessel holding 150 passengers and 80 crew. It’s German-owned which means good plumbing, mostly German passengers and all the announcements in German with no Lucy to translate. (We don’t see the bus with Lucy and Fab for 2 days). Great luxury in all departments of course and a superb afternoon tea which none of us could even look at and a 6-course dinner.

The tiny cabin has a sofa by day which converts to a single bed at night and another bed comes down out of the wall and we sleep quite well as we glide 165 Kms to Viviers, through locks which drops 40 feet very quickly. Our boat is 11.5 metres wide and the locks are 12 metres so it’s a careful fit by the captain.

I am very taken with the pretty basin in the tiny bathroom!

The plumbing works!

Day 16 Sunday 20th Sept in Viviers Provence

David is off on an excursion to the Gorges of Ardeche but I stay behind to blog – only to discover that wi-fi is not available. So much for Germanic efficiency!!! They’re behind the times regarding wi-fi.

So I have a peaceful morning reading and drinking beef tea at 11 am while David enjoys an excursion to the Gorges and returns buzzing with information about what he saw and heard. Lunch can be 6 courses if you want – NOT – then Merryle takes us on a stroll through a sleepy post-lunch mid-Midi Sunday Viviers. The only people around the steep twisted streets are other tourists and we wander through the large barge church and along the ramparts where there is a wonderful view over the river and our boat then back the other way to the massed roofs of the old town.

MV Princesse de Provence at Viviers.

It's lovely to sit on the top for afternoon tea and look at the swans. Before we go under a low bridge the crew comes along and takes down the shade awnings.

Day 17 Monday 21st Arles, Provence

We arrive at Arles early this morning with a gentle bump in the lock that wakes everyone. After a breakfast of ‘Steve’s special omelet’ as recommended by our waiter we meet Lucy, Fab and the bus plus Dr Louisa Jones, an expert on Mediterranean gardens who will guide us around special gardens selected by her.

Louisa in the Cactus River at Mas de Benoit.

These turn out to be ‘intellectual gardens’ as written up in Gardens Illustrated, relying upon shapes and forms rather than colour and paying great attention to the surrounding landscape. No flowers at all! The first one, Mas de Benoit, is along a narrow country lane where branches scrape the top of the bus and turn Fab to jelly at the insult being done to his precious bus.
Mas de Benoit is the inspiration of three garden designers – or sculptors, as we now have to call them – and a very rich owner. He isn’t present, we only get to see a gardener pruning, which must be his main job. The lavender garden is planted in a triangle and designed so that the view changes constantly as you walk along the edge. Well, that’s all very theoretical, but in fact it does! At the mid-point the distant village comes into view and totally changes what you’re looking at – and this happens with all the other views,
from the ‘rooms’ of twisted trunk olives to the Pinus pinea trees set against a backdrop of the Alpilles (the Little Alps). We see the secret garden across an orchard of olives, a swimming pool and the Cactus River.

David feels inspired to turn his Pinus pinea into sculptures when he gets home - but Ian, David and Bill as typical males are far more interested in the gardener’s pruning ladder.

We stop in Eygalieres for a coffee while the Circus Loyal passes through, their double-bogeys getting stuck in the narrow lanes.

We have quite a walk to get to the garden number two Mas de Columbe d’Or, as Fab has no intention of taking the bus up the lane. It’s hot and we trudge up the hill carrying our lunch boxes prepared by the boat’s chef and are welcomed with a rose wine by the charming owner and an invitation to go inside the house.

He’s nearly knocked over in the rush to get out of the midday sun – and what a house! We all love it instantly and are amazed to hear it can be rented for AU$24,000 (€12,000) per week. The lunch boxes are an enormous disappointment – where is our chef’s flair? Yogurt is not a lunch food, certainly not in France.

Bill discovers a bedroom with a secret door which hides the ensuite bathroom - how nifty is that? Though in the middle of the night it could be a bit tricky.

We roam all over the house marvelling at the 4 bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms and the kitchen! Fabulous! I crave that kitchen, but not at those rates. The guys were outside inspecting the Ferrari and the Mini Minor with leather seats so a good time was had by all. It's not all gardens!

Back at Arles every tourist must climb the hill past all the souvenir shops to see the old Roman amphitheatre which is now used as a bull-ring. They don’t kill the bull here as they do in Spain but anyway it’s rip-off – euro 6 each to look at an empty ring surrounded by stone seats which are covered in scaffolding and undergoing sandblasting. The noise and scruffiness are horrid and I don’t like Arles at all.

Day 18 Tuesday 22nd Avignon Provence
Once again Lucy, Fab and Louisa collect us and the dreaded lunch boxes and we head for Uzes which is a lovely-looking village that we drive through before being met by the garden owner whom we follow through twisty lanes (native guide required to find this one).

This is Mas de Noria with a passionate owner who has paid a fortune to have huge concrete pieces installed – not to everyone’s taste – and I don’t like the sculptures, but when he explains them they make much more sense. The one that looks

like a model of a house on legs is made to focus on the distant hills, the slabs of concrete at the front cut out the passing traffic and the long thin pool is based on the Alhambra.

The garden’s ‘sculptors’ are based in Morocco and have been much influenced by Islam and Persian gardens - a 'soft minimalist art' garden. It was formerly a silk worm factory and old mulberry trees have been imported to acknowledge that, there are pomegranates and fig trees, a working Moroccan water mill and many vistas stretching through alleys, always with the landscape built into the picture. Trees have been planted and inocculated with truffles and there is a large orchard - full of hornets, we are warned.

The boring lunch boxes are slightly improved by our hostess's excellent coffee then it's back to the bus and a quick stop at La Gare du Nord, an old Roman aqueduct. We have to run in and out because we must be punctual at le Chateau le Plaisir.

Chateau le Plaisir is on the market for 14.5 million euros - unsold because it's quite a small house with an enormous garden that was one man's pride and joy (there's that passion again!) and now that he's dead no-one cares. There are two gardeners dutifully keeping things tidy but it lacks that zing of the other gardens we've seen. I think gardens are very personal and the fun lies in planning and making them (or getting someone else to make them if your budget will stand it).

There's a beautiful drive in to the house and then the requisite garden rooms made from clipped box with David Nash sculptures - reverential hush - which look like lumps of charred wood.

It's all a bit sad in spite of the nice dry garden at the back but the promised stripes of box and red gauera were totally gone, so not a success in spite of some pretty flowers.

Back at the boat there was the usual delicious many-course dinner (thank goodness the serves are small) and a gypsy dancer with 3 guitar-playing accomplices. Ten minutes was enough and we were off to bed.

Day 19 Wednesday 23rd on the Rhone

Today there were no gardens, just a pleasant day doing absolutely nothing but cruising along the river and enjoying being on the boat. We stopped at Viennes and I did a little shopping in the town - but as usual it was midi with most of the shops shut and beginning to reopen as we left at 3.30pm.

Day 20 Thursday 24th Sept David’s birthday

Day 21 Friday 25th Sept