July 28 Column: Chateau de Chenonceau

For my garden column today, I wrote about visiting the elegant Chateau de Chenonceau in France’s Loire Valley. What does this have to do with gardening? Well, while exploring the chateau (castle), we saw absolutely stunning floral arrangements AND enjoyed looking at the beautiful gardens. Here’s a link to my column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Loire Valley chateau exudes elegance inside and out.

This was my third visit to Chenonceau, although the last one was way back in 2007, so it had been a while. But one of the things I remembered from our previous visits was the amazing floral arrangements in each room of the chateau. All of them are made in their floral workshop and nearly all of the materials they use come from the chateau’s gardens.

To complete the “package,” I decided to put together a slideshow for this week’s “Everyone Can Grow a Garden” video, so you can see how beautiful this chateau is and discover why I’m raving about those floral arrangements! (and let me tell you, so was everyone in my travel group)

You might find that you’ll want to pause the video on each arrangement so you can study the glorious flowers and, at times, unusual materials… such as garlic scapes!

Before I forget, the photo at the very top of this post is of an arrangement that contains the colors of the French flag.

I hope you’ll enjoy both the column and video.