When we came to view this château for the first time, we walked through the forest.
It was September. Fall was just beginning to make its case - that quality of light that turns everything slightly golden and slightly melancholy at the same time. The forest was pretty. Serene, with old trees, and full of the sort of magic that makes you lower your voice, like you don’t want to disturb whatever is living there with your human presence.
We walked through it for maybe twenty minutes. We liked it. We moved on to look at the plumbing situation, which was considerably less romantic.
Nobody mentioned the bluebells. Not in the listing, not the realtor, not the previous owners - who, to be fair, came once a year in summer and may genuinely have never seen what their own forest did in spring. Which is wild to me, but also: we bought a château we’d seen exactly twice, so I’m not throwing stones.
We bought the place. We moved in. We survived a winter I will describe elsewhere and at length.
And then spring arrived.
I want to be precise about what I saw when I walked into that forest for the first time after everything came up.
It was not “a lot of bluebells.” What I actually saw was more disorienting than that. The ground had just…become blue. All of it. Every direction, up the slope, around the trees, along the path, just blue and purple and more blue, and the light was coming through the canopy making everything glow slightly, and I stopped walking because my brain needed a second to catch up with my eyes.
It looked fake. In the way that things sometimes look so real and beautiful they loop back around to looking fake.
I stood there for a while. I don’t know how long. Long enough that Sean came to find me. He had a similar reaction. We stood there together not saying anything, which is not something we do very often, and it felt like the right response.
I wonder what else this place is hiding that we don’t know about yet. What shows up in July that nobody thought to mention. What the field looks like after a particular kind of rain. What color the trees are in October.
We’re going to find out. That’s the part nobody tells you about buying somewhere old - you’re not just buying what it is - you’re buying all the versions of it you haven’t met yet.
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Easter in the Bluebells
Our first Easter at this château, we did the egg hunt here.
It started on the lawn in front of the château, the way these things usually do - baskets, anticipation, the energy of children who have been patient for approximately as long as they are physically capable of being patient. But then we followed a trail of eggs further out, up toward the hidden chapel, and then into the forest.
And that’s where the magic happened.
Brightly colored eggs hidden among bluebells. Children running through blue and purple, baskets swinging, finding things tucked at the base of trees and nestled into the slope where the flowers grow thickest. The light was doing something extraordinary that morning and the whole scene had an unreality to it - something you just have to be there for to appreciate it fully.
I was there. I wrote the whole day down if you want to read it. But the forest part was truly the highlight.
What the Kids Did
That same afternoon, the little ones decided the forest required costumes.
They went back inside and came back as a fairy and a wizard. I mean, obviously. The math is not complicated here. You are a kid. There is a forest. The forest is entirely blue and purple and looks like it was designed by someone obsessed with fairies. You have a costume. What else would you do?
They disappeared into the trees and I just stood there and watched them and had a feeling I don’t have a great word for. Not happiness exactly. Something slightly more angled than that. Wonder, maybe? It was partially a feeling of realizing that a decision you made - a big, terrifying, are-we-actually-doing-this decision - turned out to be right. Not right in a way you can prove with physical evidence. Just right in the way it feels when you’re standing in a bluebell forest in rural France watching your children fairy-frolic and you cannot locate a single thing you would change.
The château gave us that afternoon, and we’re still wondering how to show our gratitude.
What Happens When People Visit
When people have come to the château these past few weeks, we always take them through the forest.
Not because we planned to make it part of the tour. It just keeps happening naturally -we’re walking somewhere and we pass the entrance to the forest and it would feel wrong not to go in. So we do.
And every single time, the same thing happens. They walk in. They stop. They look around. And then this smile spreads across their face - the involuntary kind, that you can’t manufacture or perform, where it means something has genuinely surprised you in the best possible way.
It’s a miniature adventure every time. Five minutes, maybe ten. And people come out the other side slightly different than they went in. Lighter, maybe. More present. Like the forest gave them back a little piece of their childhood.
I never get tired of watching it happen.
What We’re Planning
We’re not planning to just have a forest and occasionally walk through it. We have ideas.
The trails are already there - worn into the ground by years of someone walking them, though we don’t know who or when - and we want to define them properly. Mark them, name them, make them feel intentional rather than accidental. The forest should be somewhere you go on purpose, and which path you take should feel like a choice you get to make.
We’re also working out a deal with a few neighbors who want to come clear the dead trees. They keep half of the wood (which is valuable apparently), and we keep the other half for our own firewood, and we get a healthier forest. I love this arrangement. There’s something about it that feels very correct, and less…transactional. Like the right way to do things. Trading rather than transacting. It makes me feel connected to the place in a way that just hiring someone wouldn’t.
Most of the invasive brambles will be removed. In their place: wild flowering garlic in the shaded corners where the bluebells don’t quite reach, lilacs along the path edges, things that want to be in a forest and will act accordingly.
And then there’s the thing I want to build in the middle of it…
A glass house. Small, multipurpose, probably impractical, definitely happening (someday). Somewhere to eat dinner when the weather is right, do yoga in the early morning, write, think, sit. I want to be inside something beautiful (and that keeps the majority of the bugs at bay) while the forest does what it does around me. I don’t know when this happens. I know it happens. Some ideas feel optional and some feel inevitable and this one has always felt inevitable.
The Evening Walks
The days are getting longer now. Dinner at seven, light until nine, and we’ve started walking in the forest after we eat.
All four of us, most nights. The bluebells are at their peak right now and the air in there smells - I keep trying to describe it and landing on the same words, which are: clean, and green, and slightly sweet, and like something that’s alive. It’s truly glorious.
My kids are planning a bluebell picnic. They have different opinions about the location, the route, and the menu, so that will need to be sorted. But they are treating this with the seriousness it deserves, which is considerable.
Sean had to basically force me to go on these walks, which I say with full awareness of how that sounds given that I live next to a bluebell forest in rural France. But after dinner there are teeth to brush and dishes and seventeen things that feel urgent and also I had mentally categorized “evening forest walk” as something that would involve more mud and bugs than magic. I was wrong. So, completely wrong.
I used to get to the end of the day and immediately start thinking about the next one. The walks have interrupted that somehow. The forest doesn't really allow you to be somewhere else while you're in it.
France is changing things. The forest is changing things. Slowly, without permission, without making a big announcement about it.
I’ll take it.
What This Taught Us About Buying a House
We viewed this place in September. At one point I thought: maybe we should come back in spring, see it when it’s really showing itself. Make sure.
We didn’t. We bought it anyway, in its more dormant season, on the strength of what it was when it wasn’t trying.
And then spring came and the forest showed us what it had been holding the whole time.
I think about what you miss if you only commit to things when they’re performing at their best. About what reveals itself when you stay. The bluebells were always there. We just had to be here in April to see them.
There will be more. Spring has barely started and this place has already surprised us more than once. I don’t know what’s coming next, but I’m just happy we’ll be here to see it.
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How magical! We bought our house in the wintertime as well and were so thrilled to discover that the craggy old bush that took up a large portion of our front yard was an heirloom lilac! It’s always so wonderful to see what surprises may be
hiding in a new garden 🤍
I feel very drawn toward what you are doing. I can't quite explain it. There are a few places in the world I have any attraction to… I love being home. I am never bored. But your château and your forest with blue bells are places that would be lovely to see. Lucky you to enjoy them all the time.