In shreds

A friend recently gave me a small posy of artificial violets from a village near where she lives in the south of France. Tourettes-de-loup is famous for growing violets. They have a violet festival around this time every year. 

I walked into the living room this morning and found my dog lying under the table.  Now, she often lies under the table—it’s her favorite place, a kind of den—but this morning she was lurking with a classic guilty look on her face.

“Milly, what have you done?”

She slunk out from under the table with that tentative tail-wagging appeasement look that dogs do so well, leaving a bunch of strange little shreds behind her under the table .

It wasn’t until I’d gathered them up that I recognized them. . .

So much for leaving a posy on the coffee table.  She doesn’t usually steal and chew things, apart from balls, and the odd, smuggled-in bone, but she’s eaten off all the violet flower parts and left the rest, so clearly they smelled and tasted good. To dogs, anyway.

As it turned out, when I told my other friends this story, they investigated their posies more closely, and found the “flowers” were really — in one friend’s words: “the loveliest sweets! A sort of crispy white outer shell and this lovely chocolaty filling. Thanks Milly :-) ”  

All I can say is hmph! Chocolate is bad for dogs. If I’d known they were edible I’ve never have put them on the coffee table.

By the way, the photo of the posy at the top of this post isn’t the posy my friend gave me. It’s one I found on the web. I didn’t take a photo of my friend’s posy — I didn’t realize I needed to preserve it for posterity.

To learn more about Tourettes-de-loup, the violet-growing village in the south of France, where my friend bought them go here. And also here.