Tomato Festival in France: Travel blog

Very belated report on last month's tomato festival at Chateau La Bourdaisiere in the Loire Valley 13/14th Sept 2014. Lovely castle, as they are round there, as though out of a Disney film. The Gardener Prince himself let me in through the back entrance to the festival grounds, a couple of minutes before the official opening time. His tomato collection, numbering 650 varieties, is kept within an enormous walled garden. He grows them 3 plants up a wigwam and tops them quite severely. There were all the expected old varieties, plus of course plenty I’d not heard of before. He’s got a collection of red amaranths also growing in that garden, so it’s quite spectacular. A second walled garden beyond that houses his national collection of dahlias. Basically it was an upmarket garden festival in a fantastic setting. There was an enormous stall (in the former stables) of heirloom seeds on sale from Association Kokopeli, which is a continental seed savers group. And a relatively limited number of varieties of tomato on sale outside. Plus all the usual merchandise (fancy jams, sausages, gardening equipment etc.)
EU regulations allow the import of 5 packs of standard seed plus fruit and veg all for personal consumption. Which was sufficient to fill my Ryanair hand luggage allowance.
I stayed in Montlouis near the chateau. It calls itself the ‘town of flowers’, and has lovely civic plantings. The red bananas near the town hall were stunning and were a few species new to me. Montlouis isn’t really famous for its wine, but I did sample the local dessert wines and traditional dried pears.
A lovely British couple I met on t’internet ‘adopted’ me and we met up at the festival and then went together to the International Garden Design Festival in nearby Chaumont-sur-Loire. This event runs every summer in the grounds of a picture perfect chateau overlooking the river. There are gorgeous borders and some stunning landscape art. The main gardens were mostly too conceptual for our liking, but it was a lovely day trip.
I was in France for less than 72 hours. Flew Ryanair from Stansted to Tours and stayed in a hotel with a Michelin-listed restaurant. It was a fabulous holiday and do-able with minimal half-remembered schoolkid French.

Since returning from France I've bought my first house, hence the delay in posting this.
Here’s a random blog with photos of this year’s event. Seems they are pretty much the same every year though:
http://www.letastingroom.com/all-blog/festival-de-la-tomate-chateau-de-bourdaisiere/
Here are a few rubbish photos from me:

I won't translate that. Nice tomato and I have the seed.


'The big question of tomato height'...in this section of the garden he's not topped the plants. I'm not personally convinced the yield is lower.

This is the centre of a huge piece of landscape art at the garden design festival. This piece is by the British artist Chris Drury and is entitled 'Carbon Pool'. Its logs marching out of a grove of cedars, that are stripped of bark, enter a spiral and are aligned and pulled down into the centre. Great art.

 

Nice one Cinnamon

Looks like you had a good time

Didn't need to translate that one