purelyfrance

When we bought our property in 2002, (where have those 8 years gone?!) the real estate advertisement made a big thing of the property featuring une ancienne gloriette.

We couldn’t quite see what the fuss was about as most of la gloriette was buried under  a mass of trees, vines, creeper, blackberry, rocks, stones, and tiles. Cared for, it decidedly wasn’t!

When we looked up ‘la gloriette’ in our well worn French dictionary it translated to a gazebo. 

Hmm, we thought, this overgrown morass doesn’t look much like a gazebo, ancient or otherwise.

So we asked around some of our French friends who commonly labeled it une serre, which is a glasshouse.

This made much more sense as the rusted iron frame was clearly visible and it faced south presumably to maximise exposure to the sun.

It has been well made with an iron ladder on the side leading to a platform which ran along the top of la serre. We guess this was to either train plants or perhaps to enable the glass of la serre to be cleaned easily. Needless to say there is not today one pain of glass to be seen, so no cleaning required there!

All of that is really by and by. La gloriette/la serre has sat there in its untidy, mangled state for the past 8 years.

That was until a couple of weeks ago when old friends Peter and Dianne Elmsly came to stay. They are keen gardeners (I mean who brings their own gardening gloves on holiday!) and motivated by their generous nature they very kindly set about uncovering said serre.

So out came all the rocks and stones some of which could only be levered using a steel rod - goodness knows what they had been doing there, they were too heavy for even two of us to lift. And out came the aforementioned, tiles, blackberry, creper, trees, and vines.

After the first day I think Peter and Dianne wondered what they had started, particularly as the mercury shot up to over 30 degrees and stayed there!  But they are made of sterner stuff and manfully, and womanly, stuck to their task.

We did wonder if we would make any exciting discoveries as la serre was cleared, like a tombstone perhaps. But other than an almost unmovable stone sink, a 20-25 yr old looking grape vine and an egg, no other treasures were to be found.

The egg is a bit of a mystery, we still don’t know what it is or what to do with it.

So now we have a beautifully designed serre, its iron frame crying out to be brushed down and some anti-rust applied to it.

I wonder if Peter and Dianne will think to bring their painting gloves next year?

A Bientot, Bruce.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2010 at 8:49 am and is filed under Buying French bricks and Mortar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.