Rozoy Continued...

I have now recovered from my lunch with Mr and Mrs Belly and am ready to post the other pictures from the weekend. Of course today I did meet my friend Irina and her new husband for lunch to talk about how the quest for a carte de sejour is going for them. She is Russian and he is French and they are going through the same process that Cyr and I will go through in November with getting a work permit and a residence card. More on that fun stuff later....

This is the garden she has. It is in a sort of valley I guess you could say. Above the garden floor to the right is a very old church and then further to the back there is a wall remaining from a castle that was there in the 1600's I think. Check out the tree looking thing on the left side of the photo.

Everyone was finding jobs to do, I decided to pull weeds. Once I was done with my wall I asked about the odd tree that looked to have been taken over by ivy. H told me that it was actually a very old water pump that was taken over by plant life. "Oh! Do you want me to try to cut it away?" I asked hopefully. She agreed and my treasure hunt began!! I clipped away and found brick, then on one side I found a pump. It took hours just to uncover one side. After two days of work, this is what was underneath!!


It was amazing! If we could have stayed another day I would have tried to figure out how to reach the top part. Do you remember the really big and tall brown muppet that had the HUGE mouth and would dance during The Muppet Show? I felt like I was cutting his hair. I actually talked to it while I was clipping away. I think it helped. H was so excited too, she said since we cut through the large roots that she was hoping the top part would die and be easier to remove after a few weeks. I don't know about that, the thing looked like an animal ready to spring back to life and devour the pump again, but maybe not.

This is the view from where we were burning some of the brush we cleared. That is the church up top. I just kept getting carried away with the thoughts of a castle being up there next to the church. You can see H and B very small at the bottom of the photo.

So it was a really fun weekend. I typically don't do much gardening other than killing the small plants I buy or people try to give me. Really, unless you hate a plant specifically, don't give it to me. I will kill it. I won't mean to, but it will happen. Plants and Susan are like Lenny and small mice. It's completely unintentional, but it happens. That is why I stick to fresh cut flowers. I know from the moment I pick them out they are going to die. Plus no one expects me to be able to make them live longer than a week so that I look less like the Jeffrey Dahmer of horticulture and more the like the Florence Nightingale of flowers trying to help her patients live as long as possible.