Cats,
Thanks for posting the rose pictures of your trip. Do you have stories to tell, too?

Lovely! So typically French. I've only been to the Bagatelle in January, and it definitely didn't look like that...LOL.

Not too many stories. I took my niece as a graduation from college present from both myself and my mother. My mother adored Paris and my niece was very close to her. So I took my niece to all things my mother would have wanted her to see, showed her the various places we have all lived, dragged her off to rose gardens and otherwise we ate, talked, walked, ate, talked, people-watched...

Cats, did you grow up in Paris? Am I asking too many questions? Gean

Gean, temporally speaking, from the time I was 10 until their deaths, my parents settled in Los Altos, CA. Before that it was mostly Seattle and a few years here and there. But my mother was a raving Francophile and we/they would take off to Paris for 3-18 months at a time every couple of years. By the time I was traveling on my own, I had a solid network of crash pads if my parents didn't happen to be in town.

Developmentally speaking, yes, I probably did grow up in Paris. A lot of my coming of age experiences were there. Also, my values, tastes, my sense of proportion, my shopping habits, the way my home is organized, etc are much more French than American. Some of that is French via my mother, but much is just because that's what I knew as comfortable. Also, I went to high school in England, with holidays in France, for two years. And, I disliked Los Altos and CA in general--too big, too superficial, too new--so France became the culture of my self-concept.

My passion for roses is inherited from my maternal grandfather. In 1946, he moved to Berkeley from Denver so he could grow roses year round.

It looks very orderly and serene, and the building in the background lends the whole scheme added elegance. I can admire this style but my wilderness-loving heart will always gravitate toward a natural-looking country garden. The formal gardens of Italy, with their tall, dark cypresses and different elevations with many steps seem a little more mysterious than the French gardens laid out on flat ground, but they all have their place, being rooted in their own culture and traditions. Catsrose, your picture very well conveys the spirit of this garden.

Ingrid

I liked Los Altos many years ago. It was a great place to go to get away from the rat race of Stanford. Diane