France, Part 15 - Chananceaux Farm, Part 2

For the first time in a while I find myself writing from memory and not from the journal I kept while we visited in France.  Looking back though at the pictures of Chenanceaux I thought it deserved a second part as the gardens and farm of the chateau are an entity to themselves.

While there are formal gardens built by the Medici owners and those who came before and after, the farm of Chenanceaux acts almost like a small village to itself.   If Chenanceaux is Sleeping Beauty castle, then the farm and gardens are the home of Cinderella and they have a unique charm all their own.  My first impression was from a distance as we walked to the castle, and then my focus was on the castle.

I caught the hint of flowers, of a small field with donkeys, and a few buildings.   Like the garden at Clos Luce, this had once been a working part of the great house, providing food and housing staff who likely worked the lands around back in the days before even the "Le Ancient Regime"  of Louis XIV and his descendants.

Chenanceaux rises as a white faced lady over the trees surrounding the farm, with tall roofs like black miters perched on shapely heads.  The windows face out to the rivers, the forests, and the farm itself. There is a remarkable abundance of flowers in neat beds lined all up around a mill and other farm houses.

There are also vegetables, and no shortage of small and large things to pause to look upon.

Many visitors to the castle might easily miss these things, but for me I made certain we doubled back around once we were outside, and it proved well worth it.

One of the reasons I suppose I call this a Cinderella area as opposed to alluding to Sleeping Beauty is the garden itself.  I associate the pumpkins and little animals, and its not hard to imagine a woman riding a transformed squash back to Chenanceaux to a ball.  Looking back on it now, it seems storybook but in reality the people who worked farms such as this lead a hard life.   Paris might have been the heart of the revolution which toppled so many great houses, but it was in places like this that the long arms of that shadow crept to end the fairy tale nature of many noble lives.

Finally I should speak to the forest itself.  It is vast, so vast I have no accurate way to describe it.  Standing back at one of the formal gardens and looking back at the chateau, I chanced a look into the woods.  Long columns of trees surrounded a path, which while lit with shafts of light from the boughs descended into darkness.   This was certainly a Grimms sort of feel, especially on the far bank where the German border used to be back after World War II.

Chenanceaux was to be our penultimate location in the Loire Valley, which in itself is very much a fairy tale landscape of castles, quaint towns and beautiful countryside.   We had a long way to go to find our place to stay, and we were not going to be disappointed when we arrived.