Les fleurs

We had received a flyer in the post inviting us to a discussion about the village flowers for the year. I always try to make myself available to help when the flowers are being prepared each year, so I thought it would be a good idea to attend a meeting to find out what’s going on for 2025.

Our French is so much better now, but if there’s a lot being said, and it’s being spoken very fast, we still need a bit of help, so I sometimes use our translator app to see if it can throw some light on what’s being said. It’s usually pretty good, if it’s one on one, but the flower discussion got quite excited, and all the other eight attendees were all talking at once, so I decided to just go with it and see what I could understand.

What we picked up is that the local department that decides whether you’re a village worthy of a flower rating had told us that we had ‘too much rosé’. I’m not sure if that meant the colour pink, or too many roses. Either way it didn’t seem to go down too well with our audience. Our village also plants a lot of Geraniums, because they are pretty hardy plants and good for water conservation, but the department had said, “Why Geraniums? You’re not the Alsace”, this obviously caused a lot of heated responses, which, although we didn’t fully understand them, we got the idea.

It seemed like a lot got sorted out and the meeting ended well, with a cordial glass or two of Laurent Perrier, and a catch up with our neighbours.