the giverny loot shoot

 Yup, Giverny is where I went to shop today, the fair started in the streets before dawn and I was there, flash light in hand, looking for goodies. and when the sun came up and I needed a pause from brocante I slipped into the gardens of the impressionist museum and immersed myself into my favourite 'white garden'.

Here are a few things I saw at the fair but didn't buy, that includes the little pup above, he was so cute, tied up to a vendors chair, but really really wanting to trot down the street after us!

 

 And here is what I did bring home, pharmacy bottles, unused old linen; a cool leather postman's satchel;  a silver plate water pitcher;.............

 a length of unused dishcloth fabric, dated and perfect for a table runner;

this perfect sized bottle dryer, that I actually found for a friend visiting from Australia;  

and behind it the most amazing roll of 19th century wall paper.... 

this wallpaper is rather wonderful - scratching my tiny brain for ways to use  - what would you do with it?

more white flowers when the going got tough!

 the sweetest egg carrier;

 a pile of old school books and notes from biology lessons, dated 1903!

I have my favourite out of this lot, but tell me please, which is yours?!

the iris season

 Another bank holiday in France, (the month of May is peppered with them this year) and for some reason I found myself driving past Giverny early this morning, before the gardens were open.  Realising that ...

1.   The irises are in full bloom
2.   There was NOBODY in the garden
3.   There are a couple of gaps in the hedge at the bottom of the garden , just at camera height!

 I slammed on the brakes and screeched over to the side of the road.   I so hope you appreciate the lengths I go to just to bring you a good picture!  :-)

 So here is Giverny as most of us will never see it, in full mega-bloom and ... totally empty!

Clark collection at Giverny

If you are in Normandy between now and October, please don't miss this show at the Impresionist Museum in Giverny.  72 glorious French master paintings have been graciously loaned to the museum  by the Clark Collection in Massachusetts.

Sterling and Francine Clark lived in Paris,  where he was a young,  and already wealthy,  lawyer and she was his young and beautiful French wife.  They started buying paintings around 1912, purchasing works they loved and which to them embodied all that was new and fresh in the modern impressionist movement.

What a life!!  They could have been characters plucked from an Edith Wharton novel, glamorous, interesting, part of the elite New York society, who felt at ease anywhere in the world.  How I would have loved to have lived at that time ....