Pierre de Ronsard

Hello Gattina! Glad to learn you had a good time in the UK and are happy to be back at your beautiful house!

I love the colour of this one!
The leaves look extremely healthy too.

All of my roses were just about opening up when I had to come back to England. What a shame!! It seems they all bloom while I'm here in England and by the time I am there again on 28 May, all I can see is dead flowers galore.

No, no, Tommymoo, they'll all still be going strong, I'm sure! Nothing a little dead-heading won't resurrect. I once saw this rose in a garden and fell in love with it, and trawled round shops the internet and markets for two years trying to find it without success. Pictures of P. de R. looked nothing like this. I eventually saw it on a tiny, scrubby little provincial market stall and bought both the plants he had, and both bore (miracle of miracles) a label with this name on, so I have to take it at its face value. The buds are even prettier!
How long a stay are you able to make in France each time you go? Longer than just long enough to weed the garden, I hope! It's so pretty there, I bet you count the minutes until you get back.

You looked for this beauty for two years? That's incredible. Talk about love at first sight! I bet you couldn't believe your eyes when you saw the label on the market.

We normally stay in France for around 2 weeks every time, and then in England for 2 to 3 weeks. Crazy routine but there's no other way than to live like this at the moment. In summer, weeds grows very fast, of course, and I am often aghast at the terrible state of the garden when we arrive there, filled with vigorous rubbish. You are absolutely right: we count down the minutes until we go there again even though it's the "work camp"!

There's a gardening question been posted today about planting and irrigating a garden in Spain that they don't very often visit, and Nariz immediately said that the biggest problem would be weeds! She and you obviously have the same problem. The questioner is even proposing having a lawn and planting up containers. I don't think people have the foggiest idea about gardening long-distance. It's bad enough here, and we're here year round. LOL!

By the way, can you watch British TV programmes at your place? Just wondered.

Yes - theoretically illegally, but we all do it! Found Freeview works so much better than SKY. How about you?

We have a TV set but haven't set it up to watch telly yet. We (mainly me) listen to French radio in the kitchen, that's all at the moment. All the British people living there watch British TV. I suspect they don't watch French TV programmes at all!

If Italian t.v. were worth watching, we would try deciphering it - I'm quite deaf, it's much too fast, most of it dubbed so I can't lipread, and OH doesn't speak the language anyway, but the programmes are, for the most part, unutterable rubbish. (Quite a lot of it dubbed American B movies and British costume dramas). Unfortunately, lot of British t.v. is going the same way, and the decent programmes are all on so late at night, we fall asleep watching them!.

"Decipher" is a good word lol! We watched French TV at our friend's the other day (she's Algerian) and it was a rather strange music programme in the evening and it goes on an on for as long as 2 or 3 hours! You are right about British TVs. They have been getting more and more boring these days and they show loads of repeats again and again!