day 5 Loire Valley

Wednesday 9th Sept

We are met at the gates of le Chateau Chatonniere by a charming gentleman who introduces himself as the Duc de Salinas. He is staying with the Comtesse while he recovers from his grief at the death of his father: he came for one week initially and three months later is still here immersed in the history of the property and leading groups of lucky people around.

The Comtesse has lured Villandry's head gardener away and with him has built a wonderful garden consisting of eleven gardens - each with a fancy name that the French love to use. There's the Garden of Luxuriance planted with 4000 David Austen roses (sadly now past their best), the Garden of Fragrance and the Leaf Garden which is my favourite.

From a high point you can see that it is shaped like a leaf with paths for the veins and the beds of vegetables contained within box hedges. Monsieur Le Duc leads us through the tunnels of twisted willow, around the back of the chateau and through the woods carpeted with cyclamen

then back to the courtyard where morning tea has been set up with the head gardener helping to serve.

In an internal courtyard three large Alsatian dogs are baying at intervals and a cat pays us a visit, but le Duc remains affable: “Call me Rodrigo” he says and tells another historical story in great detail.

Le Duc is very interested in Australia's Prince Leonard of Hutt and wants more details from David and John. We wonder if he is planning to secede from Spain.

Morning tea under the trees is delicious. (There's lots of eating in this tour.)

Lunch is at Chinon, a pretty tourist-oriented village, BUT we are there during 'Midi' - the sacred two hours between midday and 2 o'clock when all the shops except restaurants close for lunch and siesta, even the boulangerie (baker) closes at 12.30.

I chose badly for lunch: what looked like a cute little out-of-the-way cafe turned out to be a bad hole-in-the-wall with salads off the menu. As we've noticed before in France, restaurants don't serve green vegetables unless you twist their arm and everyone on the tour is dying for greens. People talk longingly about broccoli.

Here is a lone local wending his way home for lunch with his baguette.
And pussy was locked out for Midi:"Let me in!" she cries (in French, but I understand cat.)

The garden this afternoon is at the exquisite fairytale Chateau de Rivau. Eat your heart out Disney World, this is the real thing, and Rapunzel's Garden around the chateau even features her long plait hanging from the tower turret window. The enthusiastic owner - no - passionate owner is there to personally escort us around her domain,

fetchingly attired in green with a green watering can shoulder bag and a loud-speaker device which is excrutiatingly bad. I can't stand it (or her) and prefer to explore by myself. It is gorgeous - wonderful plantings, highly imaginative and on a huge (expensive) scale but too twee for

many of us with its emphasis on fairies and gnomes. Some bits work: I really like the big red legs in the woods. Once again there are marvellous vegetables on a huge scale, the 'Garden Gargantua' which is where the legs come in I suppose.

Parts of the castle are open to the public and in the dining room David made acquaintance with a peacock. Madame's afternoon tea was on the stingy side, consisting of a cup of hottish water with a teabag on the side but maybe that's just as well, as dinner at our hotel was substantial.

Now we're packing up and heading off to the River Yonne for 4 nights on canal boats. A few people have elected to stay in a hotel rather than brave the close quarters of a canal boat which means that our 10 berth boat only had 2 couples, us and Bette and John.

There are 6 couples in the group (known as 'The Couples' as if we are a different breed) and 17 women, most of whom know each other from previous trips with Merryle. Already we are showing our colours - those who hang on every word of the guides and those who prefer to skive off on their own. I am glad to report that we are in the middle of the field, not amongst those who complain about everything - yes, there is one of those...

day 4 Loire Valley

Today we are at Vouvray, the famous white wine area, to visit the garden of le Chateau de Valmer where the Countess is a renowned landscape gardener and seed collector. The roses are past their best but there are still rare hortensias (pay attention - hydrangeas) amongst the yew

buttresses and a series of hanging gardens.

Here is David on the top lawn with the heavy terracotta urns.

Valmer is famous as a repository of old seeds which, in a reverse twist from European Union sameness, are being propogated and saved from extinction. The Countess now has over 3000 different seeds in her kitchen garden which is amazing in its size and scope.

It is also the home of France's collection of gourds - just a few of them shown here.

This is David and Merryle discussing the advisability of growing in Australia oxalis tuberosum, an edible tuber rather similar to new potatoes.
(David is not convinced.)

The son of the house, the delicious Jean, runs the winery and took us on a tour of the caves (underground cellars) and a wine tasting. Merylle was worried that we would let down Australia as it was so early on the day but she needn't have worried: we all loved the delicious sparkling and chenin blanc wines and bought up at the shop afterwards. His ancestors have been there since 1434 and he seems to have inherited their passion. Lunch was served from the bus under the stern eyes of 4 large shiny horses. It was a very warm day and by the time we got to Villandry the temperature was 36'!

Villandry was established in 1536 and is regarded as one of France's finest gardens. As you can see it is very formal: the Ornmental Garden is divided into "Tender Love", "Passionate Love", "Fickle Love" and "Tragic Love". Then there's the Water Garden, The Sun Garden, The Maze and the Herb and Vegetable Garden - where gardeners deposited just-picked eggplants, tomatoes, grapes and pears for the lucky customers, who happened to include us.

Here I am in the Sun Garden, well named in the heat of today.

day 3 Loire Valley, Chaumont Garden Festival

Monday 7th Sept
We're off today to Chaumont to the Festival of Gardens held in the grounds of the chateau. It's a semi-permanent exhibition running for 6 months and different from other festivals in that the plants are in the ground instead of being in pots. Also it's not as crowded as Chelsea. It's very prestigious and gardeners from all over the world compete to be allowed one of 26 spaces. This year the theme is gardens of colour and ranges from the bizarre to the exotic to the downright weird.

First we go to the Chateau where David falls in love with 2 huge cedars on either side of the entrance. Lucy has filled us in on the history of Chaumont and the 2 powerful women who lived here, Catherine de Medici the King's wife and Diane de Poitiers his mistress. Diane has the smaller bedroom but it has a better view of the Loire River. The gardening expo extends to the chateau with interesting art exhibitions. We are rushing to see it all including the stables and the floral exhibits before lunch.

This one is fun: mirrors are part of the garden and you are reflected back and forth.

Then there's the one with purple washing hanging up that is actually very cleverly colour graduated from purple to blue at the back and the one that looks like red Christmas puddings.

Even the lunch in the festival restaurant carries on the colour theme with this spectacular dessert of passionfruit, chocolate and mandarin.
The wines were excellent local whites and is was a sleepy bus load that drove into Amboise for an afternoon's shopping and sight seeing.

day 2 Paris to Loire Valley

We left Paris in the bus and headed off on A10 towards the Loire Valley with Merryle on the microphone giving us the history of Napoleon and Josephine with special reference to Josephine as a gardener. Her gardening bills far exceeded her bills for clothing and jewellery, and Napoleon paid up, even after their divorce.













In no time at all we were at Le Jardin de Chantal & Alain at Sologne, near Orleans, a garden 11 years old, specialising in viburnums and hydrangeas ( or hortensias as they are called in France, after Josephine's daughter.) The garden is only about an acre but the paths wind in and out amongst the shrubs so that often there seemed to be no-one else there - except Mousseline the white cat. (Yes, they are rather fond of pink: inside the 100 year-old house there is a lot of pink also.)

They have 115 different viburnums and I didn't realise how attractive they are until I saw them all together like this - autumn is viburnum's prime time with all the berries. They have a nifty system of naming the plants by writing on little clay pots from the local pottery.

Lunch was a delicious picnic served from the bus and now I see why we lugged picnic gear from Australia: in a garden is much the nicest place to eat lunch.

After a 2 hour slog along the A10 we arrived at Le Chateau des Sept Tours (Chateau of Seven Towers) and took up residence for 4 night in the Orangerie, which is a modernised addition to the chateau with great beams across the ceiling, quite hazardous in the middle of the night but very luxurious. There is an 18-hole golf course and a swimming pool, which we're not going to have time to try.

only day in Paris

It's ten years since last we were in Paris and a big difference is the number of bicycles and motorbikes. Bicycles are everywhere, chained up - you insert your credit card, pay a nominal amount and ride off without a helmet. Then you put it back in another rack, do your business and take another bicycle. Motorbikes have become taxis: passenger clings on for dear life and they roar off weaving through the traffic very fast. Sometimes they have a trailer for luggage. However, we came from the airport in a car, quietly and quickly. Now the odd departure time pays off as we arrive at 10pm, just time for a stroll around the neighbourhood and bed. We're on the Left Bank near the Sorbonne and I've never seen so many bookshops. We went into one this morning that had 5 floors of books; I bought a children's book in French and will try to read it (chosen because it has pictures.) School goes back on Monday so the many bookshops are full of people buying notebooks, paper and pens.


Next stop was Notre Dame, the grand cathedral on the Seine, compulsory for every tourist, even if you just sit in the middle and look at all the stained glass windows.

We had a typical Parisian lunch of ham and cheese sandwich and salad while sitting outside a boulangerie under the plane trees watching the world walk by, then as it came on to spot with rain, wandered up the hill to the Luxembourg Gardens - formal in blue and yellow.

We met the group in the lobby for a bus tour at 3pm. Most of them know each other from previous trips - one lady is on her 14th trip with Merryle: we are the only ones who are not return customers. "You'll get hooked, just like the rest of us," she said.

Merryle of Country Farm Perennials is the tour leader with Lucy from Bristol UK as historical consultant and Fabrice from Italy as bus driver (Lucy and Fab are alleged to be an item) and our fellow-travellers all seem to be nice garden-loving Australians, some with garden-tolerating husbands attached, others like David know resignedly that they will get to do the hard work.

The bus takes us around the main sites of Paris with a short camera-stop at each. (No, Denise, I did not get to climb the Eiffel Tower, so no photo.) In fact I left my camera's card on the bed at the hotel so no photos of Paris till I can download David's photos. Lucy turns out to be a tireless and interesting raconteur and 2 hours fly by as we drive around a Saturday-afternoon quiet Paris - though the traffic belted around the Arc de Triomphe like bats out of hell and we were glad to use the underpass to get there and back.

stopover in Dubai

It's been a long time since Mount Gambier: we drove to Melbourne, stowed the car, had an indifferent dinner at the Hilton then waited interminably for check-in - 2.55am departure: how cruel is that! Especially hard on the many children on our flight. 13 hours later and we are in Dubai and Rosy is behaving well, easily finding an internet connection in the lounge.

getting ready to go

We'll be off in less than three weeks so it's get fit and get organised time. We're spending one night in Paris then it's off to the Loire Valley, and gradually working our way through Burgundy and down to Provence.