Cloches!

Found in the beautiful gardens of Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, a 2*-Michelin restaurant not far from where we live.

No, we were not eating there. Our lunch was simpler, but very tasty, pani puri at the Punjabi in Southall, following an overwhelming urge to stuff them in my mouth! I've TwitPic-ed some hot stuff in a supermarket there.

Back to Le Manoir and its superb gardens...

Amongst many photogenic scenes, I found pots like these and these rather striking. They are obviously cloches of some kind, and we now think they are for 'forcing' rhubarb. There was a recent reference to the rhubarb triangle centred on Yorkshire in a recent edition of QI.

By an extraordinary coincidence, I found an E-Mail from our friends in Grenoble who told us that a programme entitled "Des racines et des ailes" had just been showing these gardens on French TV (France 3). Small world!

I have set up a representative set of garden photographs elsewhere on the web.