Bordeaux, France!

Bordeaux! Wow! Bordeaux is beautiful. Really.




When we arranged this trip we planned only a short visit of two nights to Bordeaux in order to see Catherine Mosbach’s “Jardin Botanique,” one of Bordeaux’s two botanical gardens, and one we’ve studied in school. And knowing nothing of Bordeaux, two days seemed like plenty of time. However, once we arrived, I immediately fell in love with the region and realized I would want to visit again. The region of Bordeaux is covered with beautiful vineyards, farmland, wonderful ancient homes and all-around gorgeous country. Kristin, Jason’s lovely fiancé, joined us for our last day in Paris and for Bordeaux and Barcelona. It was wonderful to have her company. She added a very nice mix to our travelling group.

The place we stayed at is called a “Hamlet.” It’s a home that is opened to guests and the guests are treated to breakfast and accommodations, just like a bed and breakfast in the States. Also popular here are Gites. A Gite is a self sustainable guest house in the countryside that includes a kitchen. The place we stayed at did have a Gite, but we stayed in the main house and didn’t have access to the kitchen in our place, but had a wonderful dining room, living room, spacious bathroom and separate bedrooms. Our hostesses, Sue and Cath, were a wonderful couple who treated us like friends in their home. Sue was the “business person” and Cath prepared our wonderful breakfasts. They were so extraordinarily welcoming and friendly – beyond what any of us had expected. So, if anyone is planning a trip to Bordeaux, I have a wonderful place to recommend!

Here is the Hamlet we stayed in – a wonderful, ancient home. The earliest inhabitance on record on the property dates back to 1163! Can you imagine? Most of the existing building we stayed in dated back to the 1800’s, but many sections of the walls were built from older versions of the home and were several hundreds of years older than that. The building itself was exquisite! Not fancy, but rather modest. However, the natural charm of the place through its ancient rock walls, terracotta tiled ceilings and antiqued wood floors was absolutely beautiful!

This is the old farmhouse next to the main house. Here they used to store hay and “crap” (quite literally). But it gives you a taste of the history and style of the house.


This is our cozy living room where we had our incredibly delicious British breakfasts! Sue and Cath were both Brits relocated to Italy, so we were treated to wonderful British breakfast of fried eggs, wheat toast and grilled tomatoes.


This is my “princess” bedroom. Pretty much, huh? It was so comfortable though, and very nice! Did I mention that I have a recommendation for you if you want to stay in Bordeaux?


Here’s a picture of our beautiful pool and the wonderful surrounding countryside. Once we arrived I realized how sorry I was that we only had two nights here! What a beautiful place! So much of it reminded me of Mendoza, Argentina where Jeff, Mike, John and I had a wonderful time in December. It was a very similar feel of incredible hospitality and comfort.


These are only some of the gardens at the Hamelt.

And another view… this time from the back pool area.

The Bordeaux countryside was wonderfull picturesque!

This is Albie, one of our hosts and Hamlet guards. A very friendly pup who greeted us every time we arrived home.

And this is Pinky, another of our hosts and guardians. Very sweet and friendly companions! Sue and Cath’s babies.

One of our first discoveries in Bordeaux was an old cemetery, dating back to the 1800’s. You know how I love cemeteries! We pulled over in the car (we’ve rented a car for Bordeaux) in order to look at the street signs, and we just happened to stop in front of an old church and cemetery. I HAD to wonder in to explore! While everyone was in the church, I was in the graveyard looking at the old tombstones, just like I used to do with Mom when we’d stop for ice cream! The cemetery was really beautiful as it truly displayed the love of the villagers for their past loved ones. They adorned many of the tombs with ceramic flowers, which I’d never seen before. I thought this was a great idea! A much more attractive solution to long-lasting adornments than silk flowers and very nice expression of love and remembrance. Many of the headstones and tombs dated back to the 1800’s.

Some of the tombs were just beautiful! All covered in mosses and lichen, showing their wonderful age and sense of history.

After the cemetery, we made our way to St. Emillion, a very famous wine producing town of Bordeaux. The town was a small, hilltop, medieval town, and offered wonderful wine shops and restaurants. This is a picture of part of the remaining old town wall that once surrounded the entire city.

St. Emillion had a these incredibly steep streets (which now I’ve learned are quite common to these old medieval towns). I feared for people as the climbed up and down the 20+% slopes.

This is a wonderful view of a typical street in the ancient town of St. Emillion.

Our next stop was the “Jardin Botanique” by the famous landscape architect Catherine Mosbach! I was sooooo excited to see this site, and as I mentioned earlier, this site was the main reason for our stay in Bordeaux. For a bit of background, Mosbach, created this garden to fill a need of land remediation and cultural connectivity. On one side of the large space a development for affordable housing was built, and on the other side was a major roadway and an elementary school. Part of Mosbach’s goal was to address the remediation needs of this neglected and polluted site as well as build a connection for the community between the affordable housing and the school Here results were more than extraordinary and has become the stuff of idealized study for many students of landscape architecture. Her accomplishment was more than a part or a botanical garden, it was a joining of culture, a healing of forgotten space, and an education of urban agriculture and new growth. Most of all, her park is used! In fact, people use the SHIT out of it! She was able, with her extraordinary team, to take a neglected space and turn it into a focal point for Bordeaux. A place for locals and visitors alike to take a stroll, enjoy a lunch, or write a poem. When I visited the site the place was full of people who appeared to be locals, enjoying the space on their lunch breaks, on days off, and on dates. There is no greater compliment (I think) to the landscape architect then to have people fill the space you’ve designed. Ms. Mosbach, my friend, you’ve done and incredible job! I only hope to learn from this wonderful experience of visiting this incredible park.

This image is of the front gates of the garden – wonderful steal gates that provide security when needed but also offer a beautifully artistic and sculptural element to the park.

Mosbach created a wonderful collection of water gardens intertwined by “walkable” steel paths. Unfortunately, the paths were closed when we visited so we were only able to enjoy the water gardens from the perimeter.

Here’s another view of these wonderful water gardens.

Within the water gardens were some extraordinary highlights!

One of the wonderful design elements of Mosbach’s design was these wonderful dunes. Part of her concept of this park was to emblemize the pre-historic value of the ground of the actual site. To do this she created person-made dunes that reflected the strata of the rock and sediment formations that would naturally occur at this site. In this picture below you can see the mounded hill beside me that is completely constructed by her team to look like, and represent, the natural formations of land that exist below the surface. Can you believe she thought of this? What a brilliant idea! And the construction techniques used were wonderful.

Much of Mosbach’s design reflected what would be the natural ecosystem of the region – if it weren’t for the development. A wonderful learning tool for the local kids across the street! This image shows beautiful grasses on the “natural” sand dune she and her team created. OK, when I grow up, I want to be just like Catherine Mosbach! Except a boy.

The garden was filled with wonderful details and highlights as this image of lichen and moss growing on the wooden plank wall describes.

Here’s a shot showing the levels of strata created in the sand dunes among the paths developed for visitors. It’s hard to believe that this was all made and not naturally occurring. The team did such a good job creating the site in its natural sense that it’s hard to tell that it hadn’t been existing for hundreds of years.

OK, this is just self expression. Here I’m having fun with my macro lense, taking pictures close up but I’m focusing on the background, rather than the foreground of the flowers.

Within the garden Mosbach created urban agricultural sites of local vegetable patches which can be seen to the right on the raised platform.

This is just a self expressive “creative” image taken from the Jardin Botanique.

Our next great adventure in the wonderful wine country of Bordeaux was at the winery of Philippe and his wife Mylene! Our hostess, Sue, was headed down to a local, small winery one day and asked us if we’d like to join, and of course we said YES! We drove just a few kilometers down to the home, vineyards and winery of Philippe and Mylene. There they have a “small” vineyard of about seven hectares of grapes and produce about 20,000 bottles of wine each year which are primarily exported to the local community.

There we enjoyed a WONDERFUL wine tasting hosted by the vintner himself, Philippe! He was a charming French gentleman who was very generous with his wines and cheeses. Our hostess Sue even brought some wonderful Roquefort crisps to share with our wine. Philippe shared all of his wines with us – his dry white, his two reds, his rose and his sweet white. All of them where delicious! It’s customary to drink rose’s in this regions during the summer. Normally, I don’t prefer rose’s but this was delicious! I truly enjoyed all of their wines almost as much as the charming company!

Here Philippe showed us his winery where all the magic happens. These honey-brown cylinders are the casks he prepares the wine in. Each one was named after a classic female American singer. You can imagine my delight! We had “Billy Holiday,” “Lena Horne,” and “Tina Turner” to name a few. Too funny!

A nice collection of bottles at Philippe’s and Mylene’s winery.

Here Philippe is showing us the workings if the winery itself.

In addition to our very generous wine tasting, Philippe also treated us to a special taste of an experimental batch in and oak barrel! He had purchased some oak barrels that had been used once before. He said that he normally wouldn’t’ use these “used” barrels to age wine in, but wanted to try it to see how the wine turned out. He allowed us to sample the aging wine by pulling a wax cork out of the wooden barrel and inserting a glass “eye dropper” to siphon wine from the barrel!

This wine was good, but was heavy in tannins, as Philippe predicted. The flavor was very strong and caused the corners of your cheek bones to clench!

Here’s a nice image of the table of our generous wine tastings. YUMMMMM!!!

And this was our host’s buddy. He was a friendly and beautiful black lab who was a descendent of Mitteron’s (spelling?) dog (the previous French Prime Minister). He was careful to make sure we didn’t drop a single crumb!


All in all, Bordeaux was beautiful, and Jeffrey, I can’t wait to take you there someday soon! Next time, I’ll plan for many more days here, as it deserves.