In the formal gardens of a French château, urns like this one stood along the gravel walks and terraces, planted up each spring and left to anchor the view the rest of the year. Found in Montpellier, it came out of a château in the Loire valley and dates to the 19th century, a cast-iron urn with a fluted body, scrolled handles, and a beaded foot, still wearing its old grey-green paint. Cast iron made these garden ornaments affordable for the first time in that century, turning a shape borrowed from stone and marble antiquity into something a foundry could pour by the dozen. Sylvie fills it with peonies and sets it on the table where the worn paint reads as something kept rather than cleaned up.
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