Stroll in the marshes of Bourges

Who could guess that in the heart of Bourges, just a 12-minute walk from Saint-Etienne Cathedral, there are marshes? These ancient marshes were cleaned up and transformed in the Middle Ages by monks, to become market gardening and vegetable crops.

Today, these gardens belong to the inhabitants, the Berruyers. There are some 3,000 plots over 135 hectares, where people come to garden, cultivate their vegetable garden, or just to have a corner of greenery to relax on the weekend or during the holidays. You can discover them on foot, by boat or by canoe-kayak.

And sail on the calm waters of the streams! These are canals which are fed by two rivers with a fairly weak current. A few ducks wade there, and you can see muskrats, a few woodpeckers, kingfishers and two pairs of swans with four young each.

Watch a gray heron take flight; listen to the chatter of moorhens and the song of jays; breathe in the scent of oleander, and brush against a cloud of yellow water lilies. We are almost in a Monet painting.

Some trees even “colonize” other trees. Like this oak tree that grows inside a willow tree. “It’s quite unusual, comments Nicolas, one of the blunderers. And there was even a tree that arrived, but we don’t know how, it didn’t come from the hand of man at all.”