When I was a child, the firsts images that enraptured me was the cover of a photo album that my sister made from a calendar page. It was the painting of a marvelous Chinese-styled garden of Eden, in swatches of fantastic colours of Chinese ink-brush: regal poenies in all state of blooming glory and in all colours, perfect roses, orchids and insects all thrown into a real botanical fantasy. It actually spurred my interest in plants but I never got to be a botanist as I would have liked to...instead, I became a teacher by chance. But this story is about fulfilling a childhood desire to know and to see the unbelievable; and my chance came more than 3 decades after the first encounter with the fantastics...
The following pictures were taken in La Rochelle, France. The garden belongs to an old lady who keeps an impeccable garden and my usual strolling habit took me to the front yard of this house one fine morning in the early spring of 2004. Luckily, the owner was around and permission granted, the rest was history. I don't do Chinese brush paintings anymore but these photos more than compensate for my love for the peonies. My father used to tell me folktales of an imaginary China where these regal flowers were once a symbol of the royal household and anyone found cultivating these forbidden flowers would court with treason; and shall merit beheading for punishment...(talk about reinforcing ideas into an already impressionable mind)
The first bloom of the season...
The splendour of the enormous bloom of peonia suffroticosa.
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