Sequoias at the Château de Cheverny

There are nine giant sequoia trees growing on the grounds of the Château de Cheverny, according to an inventory of the giant sequoias of France published in 2007. Cheverny is just about half an hour north of Saint-Aignan by car.

I took these photos on April 1, 2004 (no, this is not a joke), when I visited Cheverny for maybe the first time. Our friend "Chrissou" was visiting from California, and she thought it would be fun to go see the souper des chiens — the dogs' supper — in the park at Cheverny. That's when the enormous pack of hunting hounds are fed daily. It's quite a show. We also wandered around the park to took a tour of the interior of the château. The English-style gardens at Cheverny were planted between 1820 and 1860. The park at Cheverny covers 100 hectares (250 acres).

According to the sequoias.eu web site, the first giant sequoias were planted in France in the mid- to late 1850s, no none of them are much more than 150 years old. They were mostly planted as ornamentals in parks and gardens, and not just in France but all over Europe. There are more than five thousand giant sequoias growing France.

The giant sequoias became popular because they are evergreens, they are so big, they're exotic, and they are very hardy. They are also fast-growing (50 to 100 centimeters a year when conditions are favorable). I know I've seen many of them in France over the past 50 years, especially in Normandy where I lived in 1972-73 and which I visited many times over the following decades. Dozens of sequoias grow in and around the city of Rouen.

Here in the région Centre-Val de Loire, there are more than 15 giant sequoias growing in Amboise, the same number in Tours, in Blois and in Romorantin, and 10 or so in Loches. They have been planted in many of the parks of well-known châteaux, including Chenonceau, Langeais, Azay-le-Rideau, Chambord (73 sequoias!), and Chaumont-sur-Loire. There's even one growing in our little village outside Saint-Aignan.

The Taylor's Guide to Trees that I have says that giant sequoias grow up to 76 meters (250 ft.) tall in their native California. The girth of the trunk can reach 24 meters (80 ft.). Giant sequoias in France grow as tall as about 55 meters, and are vulnerable to lightning strikes that slow their growth.

50 feet (15 meters)

When we moved into this house outside Saint-Aignan in 2003, there were two Christmas trees growing in the back yard. Two different landscapers told us that one of them needed to be removed. It was in danger of falling. So we had it taken down.

This composite image shows the same tree twice, once in 2003 and once in 2020. Look how it has grown.
In the photo above on the right it looks very healthy, but in reality it looks slightly scruffy.

I measured the height of this tree yesterday using the stick-and-camera method. It's about 50 feet (just over 15 meters) tall. As you can see, we've had more and more lower branches cut off to let more sunlight into the yard and to make it easier to mow the grass under the tree.

Above is a view of the tree I measured as seen from a window up in the loft, with the vineyard beyond. You can also admire the state of the laurel hedge that encloses our yard on three sides. It was trimmed a couple of months ago, at the end of the 2019 growing season, by the same landscaping crew that took down the moribund blue spruce tree a week ago. On the left you can also see our neighbor C.'s house, which is on the market right now.

Photos can be deceiving, because of phenomena of perspective.Viewing the photo on the left, you might get the idea that the two remaining conifers in our yard are approximately equal in height. In fact, the Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara) on the left in the photo is 50% (about seven meters) taller than the one I've been calling the "Christmas tree." I think that one might be a Noordman fir (Abies nordmanniana), but I'm not an expert.

Une omelette aux épinards

You know, I've been doing this blog for nearly 15 years. Before I started using blogger, I did two other little websites where I posted photos. There's bound to be some repetition when a enterprise like this one goes on for so long. Of course, I remember very well a lot of the posts I've done over the years, but most readers of a blog like this one don't have total recall. Nor do I. I posted a recipe for a spinach and mushroom omelet, with photos, about 10 weeks ago.

So here's a post about making une omelette. It's one of my favorites, an omelet with spinach and cheese. For this one, I cooked the spinach with some chopped onion and just a little bit of cream and then folded it into the omelet. Here's another post I did about a French take on making a truly delicious omelet about 10 years ago.

Eggs and spinach are a match made in... well, some famous chef's famous kitchen. Or just in a home kitchen, to please friends and family. One of my favorite egg and spinach concoctions is creamed spinach served with warm boiled or poached eggs (œufs pochés) — hard-boiled (œufs durs) or soft-boiled (œufs mollets) eggs. Another is Jacques Pépin's mother's simple soufflé made with sauce béchamel, cheese, and spinach, which I posted about in December 2011. We ate yesterday's omelet with some left-over gratin dauphinois — scalloped potatoes with milk and cheese.

Yesterday's spinach omelet featured a good amount of spinach and not too much egg (even though I used six smallish eggs). After the spinach was cooked, with a diced onion, I added a little bit of cream. Then, separately, I beat the eggs and poured them into a hot frying pan coated with melted butter. When they started to cook on the bottom but where still runny on top, I sprinkled on some grated "Swiss" cheese (Abondance in this case) and put the cooked spinach on the half of the omelet farthest from handle of the pan. I was using a non-stick pan so it was easy to slide the omelet out onto a platter, folding the half closest to the handle of the pan over the top of the spinach filling as it slid onto the platter.

How tall is it?

Yesterday I wrote in my post that I had measured the Himalayan cedar tree, Cedrus deodara, in our yard to see how tall it was. I guess I was a little surprised that nobody asked me how I accomplished that. For years, I'd been thinking and maybe even saying that the H. cedar was probably about 75 feet tall. My measuring method put it at about 72 feet. Not bad, eh? By the way, a book I have called Taylor's Guide to Trees says that under cultivation this kind of cedar grows to about 80 feet in height. (It grows a lot taller in the wilds of the Himalayan mountains.)

I didn't figure this out all by myself, of course. I found the measuring solution on... wait for it... the Internet! Here's how you can measure the height of a tree, or anything else, using your digital camera. You need to find a stick, pole, or piece of pipe, for example, that you can measure to determine its length. You could even ask a person whose height you know to stand up against the tree trunk.


By the way, the view of the tree that you see in the photo on the right is one that we've never had until now. It was blocked by the blue Colorado spruce tree that we just had cut down. You can see the spruce stump in the photo, and see how close together the two trees were growing.

Once you have that pole or person up standing up against the trunk of the tree, you move back and take a photo in which the whole tree is visible. In the two pictures above, you can see the pole — a broomstick — that I used. It might be hard to see in the first picture, which shows the whole tree, but if you click or tap on it to enlarge the image, the stick will come into view. Just to make sure, I did an enlargement for you, above.

Now what you have to do is measure the length of the pole on the photo of the whole tree, and measure the height of the tree on the photo. I knew that the broomstick I was using actually measured 1.3 meters in length. I printed the photo, thinking it would be easier to take measurements on a paper image than on a computer screen. It turned out that the tree was about 17 times taller than the broomstick. So do the math: 1.3 x 17 = 22.1. That's the approximate height of the tree in meters. In Google, search for "22 meters in feet" and you learn that it's 72 feet. Neat.