Friday 17 May 2013

Looking out the Window

We love the views you get out of the distorted window glass of chateaux. This view is from inside the chateau of Azay le Rideau, looking across the canal towards what is now the restaurant, taken in early April.
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General News: Our trip to Tours was uneventful (except for nearly running out of fuel and arriving at the first service station with the fuel light on, only to discover that they had run out of diesel...) We were in and out of the Préfecture in an hour, and Claudette now has a new set of number plates. The farmers were all out on the road with their tractors heading to work in the fields along the D50. You can see which fields have been planted with sunflowers and which with maize now, as the newly planted crops have their first couple of leaves. The overwintering canola is still flowering like mad, the barley with obvious whiskery heads and turning increasingly yellowy green, whilst the wheat is still mostly ear free and blue green.
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Orchid Update: I took the scenic route home from the supermarket yesterday so I could do a driveby survey of some of my good orchid sites. Wow!! The orchids are looking superb all over, including a colony of rare hyperchromatic Man x Monkey hybrids. The Carthusian Pinks are also out, so purpley pinks of all hues and tints rule at the moment on the roadside banks.

5 comments:

Tim said...

Where were the MonkeyMan orchids?
I found some I couldn't identify on the Chambon-Chaumassay road... deep cerise in colour... too neat to be a monkey, although they woz growing wiv dem...

Susan said...

Tim: That will be them. Closer to Chaumussay than Chambon, on the left if you are going from Chaumussay to Chambon. There is a handy spot right next to them that you can pull into if you want to stop.

Tim said...

Yes, those are the ones...
Good, I can comment on them when I finish of the next post.

Aussie in France said...

I have a photo like that. It's lovely shot.
We only seem to have three sorts of orchids but they're all looking good!
Is canola another name for rape? When my daughter and Dutch boyfriend came to see us last Easter in Blois, they thought they were daffodil fields! My daughter's a true Parisian but I was pretty amazed that a Dutchman should confuse colza with daffodils.

Susan said...

Tim: I'm glad you've seen them. The very strong colour is one of the results of this hybridisation.

Fraussie: 3 species is a good average for gardens. Rape, canola and colza are all the same thing. Rape is the old name for it, still used by the Brits. The Canadians decided you couldn't market a product called rape and changed it to canola. I was under the impression that the word canola came from Canadian Oilseed Low Acid, but I see that Wikipedia debunks this story. The French name comes from the Dutch word for cabbage seed, and was originally used as a lamp oil. Canola is actually a type of mustard or turnip (in the same family as cabbage).

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