Garden Relief (in photos)

By: Nicholas

Abroad a month and that was just the beginning . Through my words I have done my best to recreate for you the feelings France has brought to me. My attention focused on the moment I am in, I have experienced each scent, sight and sound as purely as one can. I have worked to capture the essence of each place and pass it on through written language. Unfortunately today, I cannot bring to life the past two weeks in this same way.

When the mind's race is at rest, the world shines with a deeper brightness. At times though, thoughts do not easily accept peace. My life situation is changing and fear stirs with the uncertainty. My discomfort is expressed through my inner voice's old patterns. A carousel of illusions, memories and plans have been preventing me from completely connecting. The chateau in Sacy le Petit deserves a description that tickles the senses, but I have been too far removed to receive the place's inspiration. The obstacle that I face will become more clear with time, but for now I will only share some things in and around the garden that have temporarily given me relief from my burdened brain. 

Plums

Jam Making: Bringing the attention to the hands, we first prepare the fruit by taking out the innards. 

Seething the medieval way is sort of like milking the fruit for juice-leaving behind the skins and sometimes worms!

Add heat

The backyard of Chateau de Sacy, a great place to read and nap

A single rose blooms between the thorns, growing and wrapping  around an iron heart

With Jennifer's table tennis skill growing exponentially it is easy to forget that carrier pigeons once roosted in that background tower waiting for their next delivery assignment  

My competitive opponent Lloyd. Probably allowing recreation to create room for inspiration before our next ping-pong match.

I enjoyed listening to Lloyd Durling describe his work. As he told of his ideology and inspirations, I observed the philosophy and thought come to life off the barn wall.

Making games out of cracking walnuts with our newly graduated college-bound Connor

Hello tall sharp tool. Help Nick invent a path through the Forest garden

The whole body's rhythm  provides meditation for the spirit

Escape the Chateau to pick up warm milk and fresh eggs from the farm  

What better for relaxation than helping life to succeed  

What better to help life succeed than providing warm loving words

Not too close to the barn, yet

BBQ dinners are the best time to listen to Hermine's stories of  un-welcomed artists needing a literal kick in the butt to be removed  from the chateau 

Hermine's connection with the grounds stems from childhood play with the gardeners daughter and a young love with the bakers son

She has grown with the land and her dedication to it is apparent everywhere. For instance in this archway of green beans

Although these wonders have been fogged by my own seperation, I do not  judge my distracted mind. I am grateful that I am able to sense, from the place between the thoughts, that struggle is not permanent. Life's love is always within. 

Chateau de Sacy

by Jennifer


From Paris we took the train an hour north to the small town of Sacy-le-Petit, in the village of Picardie. Chateau de Sacy stands tall at the entrance to the village, a grand mansion that's too old to know precisely when it was built. Hermine, the owner, tells us it's been in her family for seven generations. Before that, no one who's alive knows its story. But I'm getting ahead of myself. From the train station at Chevriers, we were to walk 5 kilometers to the chateau. With our packs. In the hot sun. Nick was in charge of hitching us a ride while I was trying to keep upright with my pack on, opening and closing my fists to try to get the circulation back in my arms that the shoulder straps of my green Kelty cut off. After a handfull of failed attempts, my body was waining under the pressure. I stood in front of Nick as a car approached and stuck my leg out in addition to my thumb. The man pulled over. He spoke French, and very quickly, but we understood that he was going the other direction from us, though he would take us as far as he could. I climbed in the back and Nick got in the front seat. The man spoke on, in French, and I kept nodding, saying "oui", and "bon" a lot, too tired to translate. His humanitarianism took over and he kept on driving past his turn. We arrived at Chateau de Sacy, greatful and exhausted. 


Through the giant ancient iron gates we walked back in time. The chateau stood tall and wide, with ivy flourishing and strong pale green wooden shutters, framing the thick old glass windows and into the dark rooms. I couldn't wait to explore. We had tea with Hermine, the 69 year-old French woman who runs the chateau, and Connor, the barely 18 year-old from upstate New York, a fellow wwoofer. After tea he showed us around and I fell in love with each step. In the rustic kitchen the paint had chipped and worn away on the outfacing wall to reveal the stones and mud concrete the original builders used. The varying shapes and sizes of the stones are an al fresco mosaic, striations forming fossils of the history of Chateau Sacy. Down the hall is Hermine's office, painted a warm sunflower yellow, a green and masculine billiards room, and my favorite room on the ground floor, the drawing room, outfitted with turn of the century red velvet couches and intricate regal apholstered chairs.  A thick but buckling creamy wallpaper with faded green and yellow floral design covers the walls, and giant gold gilded mirrors hanging off the walls somewhat precariously, while a white marble fireplace adorned with a porcelain bust sits opposite the door. A room so grand you feel the need to whisper inside it. The chateau holds two more floors, and my room is reminscent of Van Gogh's spare but lovely one with colorful walls, high ceilings, and a giant window. 

reading in the kitchen

Hermine is such a character I often can't believe I'm not reading about her in a book, but she's really here, doing and saying unpredictable things and running the grand maison. In her past lives she was a tightrope walker, a singing sensation (largely in Japan), and who knows what else. She's now the wife of famed English writer Hugo Williams, among other things. It's all there on Wikipedia if she's too "bored" (one of her favorite words) to tell you herself. She has rules for eating, like no butter on your bread at lunch or dinner ("daft Americans, it's just not done in France!") and if I get the wrong plates when I set the table ("those aren't for potatos, we're not having stew!") I get yelled at. She's interesting, scatterbrained, and always busy running around talking (to you or herself?). When she gives you a job in the morning she follows or proceeds it with "If it's not too boring" or "Can you face it? Is it too terrible?", and you do it, and hope it's how she likes, and that at the end she says "Ah, bon" and not "Oh, no! What have you done?!" which can sometimes be the case. 


The jobs we do are fairly easy. Weeding the potager (kitchen garden), planting new seeds (winter lettuce and beans), and clearing the paths from place to place. The landscape is vast and beautiful, with the potager, an open field, a small field of rasberries, a tree-lined square, a secluded path throughout the back of the garden, and beyond a locked old wooden door, the secret garden, or what Hermine calls the forest garden. At the edge of a wheat field, it has mostly weeds, but also a beautiful path (thanks to Nick) as well as a black plum tree and some small wild flowers. All the greens are lined with quaint rectangular english bushes, like a maze. Hundred years old pear trees, apple trees, and plum trees pepper the property, as well as a mulberry tree, red and white currants, roses, herbs, and flowers. The Chateau is quiet and serene, the only thing to interrupt you are the birds singing to each other and the occasional wild French cat.


I've made rose hip jelly, plum jam, and apple sauce with fresh ingredients harvested from the garden. An ordeal, I quite like making jam, and love the look on someone's face when they're enjoying it. After work I like to read at the yellow table with one chair hidden in the back corner of the property among the trees. We play table tennis with Lloyd Durling, the English artist in residence (who's said my rose hip jelly is the best he's had), and John, the English cyclist who's also wwoofing. I spend time gazing out my giant window, breathing in the fresh summer air, while the boys play French Billiards. 

Collecting apples for applesauce 

When I'm in the kitchen alone I look into the beautiful antique tin boxes full of tea, sugar, and coffee. I fantasize about what I would do if the Chateau were mine. The changes I would make and the things I wouldn't dare to touch. I picture myself walking around the big empty house in winter, clutching a sweater close the my neck, in wool slippers, tending to the fire in the drawing room and gazing out at the gray white sky deciding whether or not it will snow. Is this life in my future? Only time will tell.

The Clumsy American Chef

by Jennifer

I walk into parked cars/trees/lamp posts. There's a little background for you. My second day in France, in Villeneuve Loubet, Nick and I decided to take bikes to le plage for a dip in the méditerranéen sea, but the bike was too big for me, and though I tried to ride it anyway, I only got to the first gravelly and hilled sharp turn before I fell off and dinged myself up. My knee was scraped and bleeding from the thick gravel combined with the high speed, the bike something had cut my foot, and trying to prevent my fall, I had gashes on my hand as well. And I hadn't even started working.

I have aprx. 20 cuts on either hand from the little knife I take with me everywhere on the farm to harvest vegetables and to tie tomates to show them the way to grow (one of which I cut to the vein in my wrist by a vast over exaggerated attempt to harvest an eggplant). I have blisters on the insides of my thumbs from raking. I have scrapes up and down my forearms from harvesting courgettes and about 10 splinters (most of which are still inside the skin) on my thumbs and fingertips from the eggplant. I'm bad at not getting hurt. During a break for lunch one day Markus the English farmer said to me, "You look like you've been on the frontlines".  All this plus a freak accident in the kitchen when a colander fell off the top of the fridge and cut my nose open. My body needed a break.

So I started spending less time in the fields and more time in the kitchen. At first I just made courgettes sauteed with onion, garlic, olive oil, and herbs de provence with the eggplant fries I've perfected and some nice strawberry salads. But everyone seemed to love my cooking...and I was happy to be  in the house where less bad things could happen to me (although the kitchen can be a dangerous place...proceed with caution). I decided to be more creative and really use all the ingredients on the farm. I made tomatoe sauce from scratch for the first time in my life. Nothing came out of a can, and better yet it all came from the farm. I made a strawberry tart out of practically nothing, on a celcius oven no less! Everyone was complimenting my cooking and I was eager to try new things. When our host had some friends over for lunch, me trying to keep up with the conversation in French, they looked at me and said, "c'est bon, this is very good. You made this?" and I was beaming that an actual French person complimented my cooking.

Sensing my adventurous culinary attitude and love of a challenge, the farmers started bringing me things to cook with. Peppers, tarragon, mint, and the biggest challenge of all: a giant, overgrown zucchini that was now a sort of...butternut squash? It had been sitting in the garden for months. I had passed over its girth many times and thought 'why don't they put this rotten thing in the compost?' Apparently they were waiting for the perfect chef. Markus brought it in to me and said, in a thick London accent, "Can you make like a pumpkin pie with this or something nice?". At first I thought he was joking. A pumpkin pie with an old zucchini? Turns out he wasn't.

I set off on the task after staring at the giant thing for a while. I decided to make a meal out of it, with a savory plat and a sweet pie dessert. I started cutting it up and boiled half of it, in small pieces, with some fresh ginger and sel de mer. The other I started cooking in a big pot with tomatoes, basil and garlic. When the boiled squash was soft I used a salad spoon to mash it like potatoes. I added sugar, cinnamon, butter, and nutmeg. I made a crust of oats with egg and flour to bind and popped it in the oven. I cleaned the seeds, added some salt, and toasted them.

Over the next few days I made many meals out of scratch: chili with eggplant substituted for meat, salads with sweet and savory dressings, gazpacho, and a 9 person feast starting with a hot and spicy tomato soup for an amuse bouche, with cous cous, courgettes with herbs and oil, eggplant Japan (an Asian inspired baked eggplant dish invented by Rhea), a grated carrot salad, and a chocolate brownie for dessert, drizzled in strawberry juice and ripe strawberry slices with mint leaves. It was decadent and amazing. I was proud. This day was the first of a new wwoofer, Nadej, from the north of France. She said to me, "I thought Americans were horrible cooks. You must be the best American chef." I beamed, knowing that I am not by a long shot the best American chef, but it's nice to hear all the same.