Christmas roses

Usually, Christmas roses refers to the December-blooming hellebore, Helleborus niger. But as this early morning view out the dining room window of our house in Normandy shows, even as Christmas approaches, we still have real roses. The frost lay thick on the grass beyond, but this shrub rose, closely sheltered by a south-east facing wall, is still blooming strongly and full of buds. Meanwhile, the Corsican hellebore nearby is about to flower as well.

While this is strictly speaking the Paris postcard, this time I want to describe for you a little bit of the spirit of Upper Normandy where we spend all our weekends. We arrive exhausted at the end of a 2-hour drive on Friday evenings, my partner Denis worn out by a grinding work week, and I from my day's preparations for the weekend. I spend most of Friday racing here and there (on foot), buying supplies for the weekend's culinary adventures, which usually center around grilling in the enormous brick and stone fireplace that dominates the dining room and indeed is the center of the entire house. (See photo of Denis in front of this beloved fireplace at below.) Doing the shopping in Paris leaves us free not to run errands while we're in the country.

We always depart with many thermal bags loaded with provisions, as well as our overnight bags, books we want to read, art supplies, and so on. In brief, a lot of schlepping. But once we arrive and unlock the big white gate, and proceed down the driveway between the rose hedges to the house, we begin to unwind.

At this time of year, being that Normandy is extremely far north, the days are very short. Night falls between 4:30 and 5:00 in the afternoon, so it's pitch black when we arrive. This weekend we were treated to a spate of absolutely clear skies (unusual for Normandy), so the sky was an enormous black bowl spangled with brilliant stars. There is practically no ambient artificial light to spoil the view of the night sky there. An owl hooted, emphasizing the chill and vastness of the night.

We unlocked the house, and I set to unpacking and preparing ingredients for dinner, while my companion heads out to one of the outbuildings to bring in some firewood. All of it comes from old apple trees that have keeled over on the property.

The next morning, Denis sleeps in while I have a slow morning of coffee and reading or knitting a bit down in the dining room, before heading out to work in the garden, if the weather allows. While it never gets as cold--temperature-wise--as it does in, say, New York or Chicago, Normandy has lots of rain and deeply humid chill. But this Saturday was a brilliant blue morning, with sun glittering on frost.

I set about to a satisfying day of cutting down an enormous climbing rose on the corner of the house that had died--probably of that mysterious rose decline one often reads about. The thing had climbed well up the second story, and cutting and pulling it down--not to mention dragging it off or grubbing out its tree-like stump--was no mean task. Then I worked a lot of a wonderful, organic horse manure compost we buy in nearby Yvetot into the soil where the rose had been, using the mother of all garden forks. This wonderful fork is hand forged in Provence, and is made industrial-strength gardening--if that isn't a contradiction in terms. It is admittedly heavy, but its construction makes heavy work so effortless that you don't even notice its weight.

In place of the lost rose, I planted a Clematis montana 'Rubra', the elegant, small-flowered, delicate pink clematis that blooms in May with dense masses of vanilla-scented blossoms. Since it is very robust, it was the perfect replacement for the rose at the corner, where we need something tall to soften the steep vertical wall of the house.

If you're wondering why I didn't just plant another rose, be forewarned that you can never replace a dead rose with another, or the second as well will soon follow the first into the land of the dead. No scientist seems to have explained this phenomenon, but all rosarians concede it is true. So, we switch to clematis. Kind of like a forced rearrangement of the furniture.

In the afternoon, we went to the nearby town of Veules-les-Roses, a tiny jewel of a village nestled into the hills sloping down to the sea. It is home to the shortest fleuve in France, (a fleuve being a river that runs directly into the sea) called La Veules. This mini-river runs fast and fairly deep right through the town. Its origin is a copious spring that is first diverted into large cressoneries, or watercress beds, before returning to its fierce if diminuitive flow through the town.

We took a long walk on the beach at low tide, as is our habit, to admire its ever-changing and exquisite colors of sky reflected in water, white, soft, calcareous seabed inlaid with erosion-resistant black flint nodules. These emerge like contemporary sculptures from their calcareous bed. This day the scene was a fantasy in purest blues, soft sables, and the distant green at the top of the cliffs. It's the kind of place that makes you breathe deeply, renewing your sense of self and place.

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