Roses! They cascade over ancient stone walls, climb up the sides of quaint, half-timbered cottages, frame rustic gates and doorways, or stand alone in formal gardens, set against medieval masonry. They are red, pink, yellow, orange, peach, white and a myriad of other colors. They are everywhere, fragrant, cheerful, beautiful. When you travel through the French countryside in May or June, stopping in villages and points of historical interest, you will encounter roses everywhere.
We have selected a few of our favorite French country rose images for you. They are typical of what you will find. But in fact we are merely scratching the surface to give you an idea of their abundance and to encourage your own further exploration.
PICARDY
The above four matched photos form a collection we have just added to our shop. You can see the set here. The images are also available as individual prints here.
Here are some other village photos from Picardy.
GIVERNY
These photos were taken in the grounds of the Ancien Hôtel Baudy in Giverny, a village best known for Claude Monet’s house and garden (including the famous lily pond which appeared in some of the artist’s most famous masterpieces). These roses were there when some very well-known painters, including Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, carried their easels into the hotel’s garden where they could paint their beautiful creations. A studio used by these and perhaps less famous painters of the Impressionist period still stands in the grounds of the hotel, looking much as it must have done in their day. The roses are a spectacular part of the charming garden.
VILLANDRY
In the Loire Valley, the Château and Gardens of Villandry make for a very worthwhile day trip from Paris. The formal gardens were designed with enormous care and a great deal of work and include a profusion of roses – climbers covering stone walls, rose trees of all colors carefully arranged in rows, rose bushes draped over metal porticoes and hoops and growing on trellises, and beds full of roses, all against a backdrop of the beautiful, ancient château walls and outbuildings.
DISCOVERY
We have chosen just this handful of locations to as representative of what is there to be enjoyed. We urge you, if at all possible, to set out on a voyage of discovery of your own. Normandy and Picardy are great places to begin, but you can continue down into the Loire Valley and further south.
If this is not practical, then we invite you to visit parisianmoments.com gallery of French Country prints and canvases where we have many images for you to view. You can select some of these to decorate your home and help you keep the dream alive of visiting these places and enjoying their wonders for yourself.
Should you look for prints or canvases of any of the images in this blog post but don’t see them in the shop, please contact us and we will help you.
Thanks very much for reading the blog post. We hope you enjoyed it. We would love you to leave a comment and share this blog post with friends or anyone you think might be interested.
À bientôt!
Georgianna and David