...the summer of 2005 was surpassingly hot and not only in August; during all three months of the season the temperature rarely dropped below +55° C, an unprecedented if not a never-before-seen anomaly. But that was not the only present we received from Mother Nature last year. There was almost no rainfall at all during the entire three months in the valley of the Loire (Val de Loire) ...

... last summer during those three critical months the trees and all their vegetative fraternity from our park and magnolia garden had been living without water. There was nothing left to water them. The wells were practically dried out and the water level in our lake dropped so dramatically that little was left for our fish. All the plants found themselves in very severe condition. Compounding this – most specimens of our park and garden were planted only a year or two ago and did not have time to restore their root system, thus making even clearer the dire environmental conditions of our plants. To complete the picture, we may recall that most of them were planted in pits gouged out of limestone...

... However nature’s surprises were not limited to the season of summer heat. Winter came after a quite rainy and ordinary autumn. And then nature gave us its next gifts! The winter of 2005-2006 in France was extraordinarily cold. For the first time in two hundred years the magic landscape of the Valley of Kings was twice blanketed by snow. The temperature dropped to an incredible -18° C. However, despite this incredibility it was a fact. Both our park and magnolia garden were covered in snow... Theoretically speaking, palms and magnolias might have perished just from the frost and snow, not to mention the effects of the summer heat. The fact is that plants inevitably suffer from shock after withstanding the relentless effects of the sun for three summer months...

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