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~ A fairy-tale cottage by the Seine in Normandy

chaumierelesiris

Tag Archives: Gardens

Giverny, On and Off Canvas

21 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by chaumierelesiris in Culture, Les Iris, Normandy, Things to do

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Art, Gardens, Monet

If you’re heading to Normandy and interested in gardening, a visit to Monet’s garden at Giverny will be on your bucket list. It’s an easy hour’s drive from Les Iris and a wonderful day trip.

For those in London before April 20th 2016, a great warm-up is Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse at the Royal Academy. Bringing together an immense number of works by Monet and his contemporaries, the exhibition examines the role gardens played in the evolution of art from the early 1860s to the 1920s.

It’s a blockbuster exhibit that brings many works together for the first time in living memory. Book ahead and expect crowds. The exhibition is free for under 16s, and the free Art Detectives guide kept our children engaged.

And if you can’t make it to London, the Royal Academy have produced an informative series of videos introducing artists’ gardens in northern France –  Monet at Giverny, Pierre Bonnard’s garden at Vernonnet in Normandy, and Henri Le Sidaner’s garden in the medieval village of Gerberoy, Picardy.

Monet in garden    Monet 2.PNG

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The Feast Day of St Fiacre

01 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by chaumierelesiris in Culture, Food, France

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Tags

bread, Food, Gardens, museum, St Fiacre

This week was the feast day of St Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners, in France and Ireland. As well as being the patron saint of gardeners, St Fiacre is the patron saint of our village in Normandy. Each year to mark the day, a special mass is held in the the ancient village chapel, and the residents gather for a meal together on the banks of the Seine. It’s a peaceful, slow-moving day before the bustle of the return to cities and schools and jobs in September. Here is the post I wrote about the day last year:

*****

Our Daily Bread

Bread is given three definitions in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

  1. a usually baked and leavened food made of a mixture whose basic constituent is flour or meal
  2. livelihood <earns his bread as a laborer>
  3. food, sustenance <our daily bread>

It is in search of bread under its first definition, a baked food made from flour, that we go as soon as we set foot on French soil. A truism, still true: bread never tastes quite like it does in France. For baguettes and croissants, an early morning run up the hill to our local artisanal bakery, Le Fournil de la Roselière in Sainte Opportune La Mare,  does the trick. Although it stands alone in a quiet village, I’ve never seen it empty. Cars and trucks are constantly pulling in and owners whisking out with their daily bread in hand.

In a nearby village, La-Haye-de-Routot, is Normandy’s Bread Oven Museum. Every Sunday afternoon during the year, and every day in the summer, there are bread-making demonstrations.

The bread oven cottage is small and dark, and the bread oven is enormous, filling half of the cottage. It’s the kind of oven Grimm’s witch might have tried to push Hansel and Gretel into. Our children are sceptical, and they keep their distance. The boulanger is large and muscular and has a booming kind of voice. He starts us from the beginning, showing how he heats the oven and removes the coal and ash. It’s hard and hot work, requiring patience.

While he works Monsieur le Boulanger keeps up a comic patter with the audience, telling jokes about the clueless Parisians who take his bread-making courses. He only bakes in the traditional way, he tells us. Baking and keeping alive the art of traditional bread making is quite literally his livelihood.

He shows us how he shapes and decorates the bread, using a special tool for the detail. A pinch here, a prod there, a few seconds of extra work and people will pay three times more for a loaf, he chuckles.

While the bread is baking we go for a walk and return to the smell the baking bread. Now the children are keen, gathering close to the boulanger. Each has a go at helping to remove the bread. The paddle is carefully inserted under a few loaves and then the bread is pulled out with a fast, powerful tug.

Afterwards the fresh bread is sold. We leave with the warm loaves nestled in their white bags, ready for the evening meal.

With most meals in France we eat bread, freshly made and often hot: daily sustenance. One Saturday evening there is a mass in the village chapel, to honour the feast day of the village’s patron saint, St Fiacre. He probably started off as Fiachra, an Irishman, who travelled to France and built a hospice for travelers. Legend has it that St Fiacre furrowed a great garden with his staff. He is the patron saint of gardeners and taxi drivers. This seems fitting for our village with its beautiful cottage gardens, and I like the anomalous conflagration of rural and urban. It’s the story of our lives.

We arrive at the chapel just as mass is starting and are invited to sit in the only free seats, uncomfortable and ancient wooden pews at the front. Next to us is an unexplained heap of warm brioches. Brioche is made in a similar way to bread, but is enriched with egg and butter. It was often used as blessed bread in French churches, and was sold at market in the butter centres of northern France.

The mass is long and the chapel is full. We are hungry and the brioches smell so good. Finally as mass is ending, the priest and the mayor come forwards. The priest blesses the special St Fiacre brioches, sprinkling them with holy water: bread of life. The mayor invites the congregation for a glass of sparkling wine in the mairie, and the brioches are distributed. In the morning for breakfast, is the glistening golden brioche all the more delicious for having been blessed?

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An English Garden in Normandy

28 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by chaumierelesiris in France, Normandy, Property in France, Things to do

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architecture, France, Gardens, Gertrude Jekyll, Les Bois des Moutiers, Lutyens, Normandy, Varengeville

This is a month for visiting gardens. After showers in April and May, Normandy in June is in greenish bloom. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the most famous garden in Normandy. Shortly after, I visited another, less famous but equally wonderful garden–let’s call it the most famous English garden in Normandy.

The house and garden Les Bois Des Moutiers were created from 1898 onwards by the Mallet family, who hired the then young English Arts & Crafts era architect Edwin Lutyens and the wonderfully named and widely influential garden designer Gertrude Jekyll.

Les Bois Des Moutiers

Gertrude Jekyll is famous for creating gardens that feel like series of outside rooms. Each one has its own scheme of colour, scent, and seating.

Les Bois Des Moutiers

Les Bois Des Moutiers

Les Bois des MoutiersBench, Les Bois Des MoutiersLes Bois des Moutiers

Look at this amazing wisteria, trained to grow as a tree. The gardens, with their hedges and bushes and secret paths, create a wonderful natural playground for children.Honeysuckle, Les Bois Des Moutiers

Les Bois des Moutiers

You can hike around the extensive land behind the property, and there are wonderful views. The house can be visited by private appointment only. And should you love it enough, ask about buying it as the family are seeking to sell to the right, suitably considerate, buyer. Price on application only.

Les Bois Des Moutiers, Varengeville, Normandy

The property is situated in the charming Varengeville-sur-Mer, which is south of Dieppe on the Normandy coast and just over an hour, cross-country, from Les Iris.  Hike up the road outside the property to the church at the top for a spectacular view of the sea.

Les Bois Des Moutiers, Varengeville, Normandy

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The most famous garden in Normandy

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by chaumierelesiris in Culture, France, Normandy, Things to do, Travel

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Art, Flowers, Gardens, Giverny, Monet, Normandy, paintings

Giverny–where Claude Monet lived and painted for 43 years–is certainly the most famous garden in Normandy, perhaps in all of Europe or even the world. It was here that he created the water garden with its iconic Japanese bridge that he painted over and over and which hangs, in reproduction, on a million institutional walls.

A visit to Giverny, however, doesn’t start with the lily pond, but with the rather fabulous–and previously unknown to me–Clos Normand, his magnificent wildflower garden.

The garden, which fronts his house, is laid out in corridors of colour: one purple, one yellow, one pink. Flowers and rose arches rise on either side. Even though it’s crowded – on a midweek afternoon during school season we waited 20 minutes for our tickets – you can lose yourself wandering through the fragrant lanes.

Flower garden, Giverny

Flower garden, Giverny

Le Clos Normand, GivernyFlower Garden, GivernyGarden, GivernyFlower garden, GivernyFlower garden, Giverny

We visited in early June, and the flower garden was bursting with colour, all poppies and peonies and hollyhocks and irises.

Irises, Giverny

Peonies, Giverny

Hollyhocks, GivernyPoppies, GivernyPoppies, Monet's Garden, Giverny

All those poppies recall the Monet print that hung in my childhood nursery, the one of a girl and her mother walking through a poppy field, the girl wearing a boater not unlike my school uniform hat, and the mother wearing a scarf and carrying a parasol.

The gardeners were busy at work, tending to all that wildness.

Gardener, GivernyGardener, Giverny

If the flower garden offered more than I expected, then the water garden was slightly underwhelming. The two gardens are intersected by a busy road, and there is noise from the traffic on the road. And to be fair the day was grey, the light flat. The pond is really very small, and not as lovely as it is painted in oil and hanging on the walls of the world’s great museums. It reminded me of visiting the most famous gardens in Japan. Like this one they were perfect on a small scale, and elbow to elbow as crowds of tourists sought just the right picture for their holiday blog.

Le Jardin d'Eau, Claude Monet, GivernyLe Jardin d’Eau, GivernyMonet's Water Garden, Giverny

Monet’s house is worth a look. It has been renovated recently, and rooms on both floors are open for viewing. The bedroom overlooks the gardens. The painter’s bed is curiously small for two people, and the ensuite bathroom is luxurious. What is known as the yellow kitchen is in fact a dining room with a large table, with a smart blue kitchen beyond it. It seems that the Monet family enjoyed their entertaining–and who wouldn’t, in such a spot?

Door to Monet's house, Giverny

The children brought along The Magical Garden of Claude Monet, which takes a child and a dog on a tour of house and gardens. They enjoyed discovering the places shown in the book – especially Monet’s boat.

There are a number of official and unofficial websites dedicated to Giverny, of which we found the best for visitor information to be the Claude Monet Foundation website.

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Peacocks and Pelicans: Le Parc de Clères

05 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by chaumierelesiris in Normandy, Things to do, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Birds, Cleres, Gardens, Landscape design, Normandy, Zoo

I had read about the chateau and gardens at Clères in passing. It is mentioned for its interesting collection birds in guidebooks, and recommended as a good day out for families staying near Rouen. The Michelin Guide Normandygives it several stars, but doesn’t explain why. I was intrigued, and when we found ourselves wondering what to do on a cold, bright autumn morning in Normandy, we packed everyone into the car and headed towards Clères.

Nothing prepared us for quite how lovely Le Parc de Clères would be. During the 1860s the park was landscaped by the Comte de Béarn dans le style des parcs à l’anglaise. In 1919 Clères was purchased by zoologist Jean Delacour, who hired English Arts & Crafts garden designer Henry Avray Tipping. Delacour was a great traveller and collector, and in time Clères became a home for his collection.

And what a collection! Clères is famous for its birds but there are also mammals: peacocks, pelicans, cranes, ibis, gibbon, wallabies, antelopes and many more. Most live in the parkland in semi-freedom: there are few visible cages or barriers. It took us about two hours to walk around the gardens, with many stops to climb trees, watch flamingos balancing on their spindly legs and pelicans dipping their droopy beaks.

Parc de Cleres

We loved the juxtaposition of the historic chateau with these southern hemisphere mammals, lazing in the watery autumn sunshine.

The chateau, which was not accessible for visiting on the day we were there, is interesting too. There are buildings from many different periods, including medieval fortifications, a 16th century manor, and later additions.

CleresCleres

The town of Clères is charming and a short walk from the Park’s gate. There are several tea rooms and bars, perfect for a refreshment before the drive home. All in all an excellent, and inexpensive day out for our young family. Our reduced price tickets were 4 EUR each – a bargain compared to urban zoos in the UK which can cost over GBP 15 per person.

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