Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The World Health Organization (WHO) reported a 16 percent increase in 24 hours in the number of A/H1N1 (swine flu) cases worldwide, from 6,497 confirmed cases Thursday 14 May to 7,500 Friday. During the previous week, the increase was 200 percent. The statistics hide a more complex picture than the dramatic rise in numbers at first appears to show.
By students at Collège Voltaire, Geneva
Abruzzo, Italy, May 2009 (photo, Gabriele Tosi, Order of Malta, reproduced with permission)
Although the Swiss Red Cross has already sent help to the victims of the Italian earthquake that devastated the town of Aquila in Abruzzo, Italy 6 April 2009, Italy still needs donations. The Swiss association sent 200 tents and CHF 300,000.
By T.C-M.H, Collège Voltaire
In Geneva, spring is here and with it lively, animated Geneva streets.
Everybody knows the main tourist places, the Jet d’eau, the St Pierre Cathedral, and so on. But do young people want to go there? There are many other less well-known spots that are more appealing but which remain unexplored by the tourists.
To start you off, here are four popular places:
L’Usine: the hub of alternative culture in Geneva. Young people in Geneva go here for concerts, art shows, theatre and other cultural activities. Also look at the funky BFM building, which dates from 1883. Today, it holds concerts and dance shows.
Bain des Paquis
Les Bains des Pâquis: These public baths have existed since 1872. Today, they are a favourite summer place in Geneva. You can relax in the hammam or the sauna, plunge into the lake or simply lie in the sun on a chaise longue. You can also enjoy the « buvette » and its delicious chocolate cake, salads, and (if you are old enough) a nice cold beer.
Morges tulip festival
Lake Geneva region, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mother’s day in Switzerland is coming up on Sunday 10 May. Many special activities will be taking place over the weekend that could be ideal for celebrating. The CGN lake boats company offers a special Mother’s day lunchtime cruise on Lake Geneva where mothers are the guests of honour. The final day of the Morges Tulip festival also falls on 10 May.
By Jared Bloch
Writer/Director Peter Kerekes
What happens to the war effort when the Army chef spoils the food? As one character in Peter Kerekes “Cooking History” proclaims, “there is no war without food.” And maybe no successful war campaign without good food.
The premise for this alternately wry and sobering movie evolved out of a conversation between Kerekes and his father. “The idea was to collect stories from ordinary people, and to show how they can, and have changed history,” Kerekes told Geneva Lunch during a conversation on the final day of the 2009 Visions du Réel Film Festivalin Nyon.
photo, Sophia Pereira
by Sofia Pereira and Melanie Miranda
Geneva, Switzerland (Collège Voltaire student newspaper) – In 2009 there are some important birthdays and events to celebrate them: the 500th birthday of John Calvin and the 450th anniversary of the Collège de Geneve. Can you imagine them being so old?! Let’s go back in time: during the 16th century some people, inspired by Martin Luther’s ideas, wanted to establish what would become the Protestant religion. Calvin didn’t agree with the Catholics of the day because he felt they obliged believers to pay for their salvation. He believed that salvation was a gift from God. Calvin, a French reformer, arrived in Geneva in 1536.
Danger from Mexico
© Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
Ed. note: If you subscribe to the GenevaLunch news feed you don’t receive Genevan Patrick Chappatte’s cartoons that appear on the GenevaLunch home page regularly or our blogs on being new in Geneva, food, wine, books, film reviews and more – so be sure to visit the site as well.
Film reviews from Visions du Réel
For writer and director Shen Ko-Shang, character development is fundamental to movie making. “I have seen many nice films here [at the Visions du Réel Film Festival] but for me to really like a movie, the characters have to have heart,” Ko-Shang explained through an interpreter. Shen Ko-Shang, whose documentary “Baseball Boys” and film short ”Fading” were screened this week at the Visions du Réel Film Festival, shared with GenevaLunch his impressions of the festival and thoughts on filmmaking.
Film characters have to "have heart"
A native of Taipei, Taiwan, Ko-Shang travelled “half-way” around the world for the premier of “Baseball Boys.” The documentary is based in a rural area of Taiwan, characterized by its native inhabitants and traditional lifestyle.
It was this unique background which interested Ko-Shang, and inspired him to document the trials and tribulations of an aspiring Little League boy’s team in Hulien Province on Taiwan’s East Coast. “These kids are unique due to their background and rural heritage. This way of life is very distinct from my reality in Taipei and I find their experiences interesting.”
A group of 15 top winemakers from nearby Beaujolais in France are the guests of honour at the Arvinis wine fair in Morges, Vaud (22-27 April). GenevaLunch paid a visit to two of the producers, part of this group that was recently organized to raise awareness of the best of Beaujolais.
We looked at the close ties between the Lake Geneva region and the vine-covered hillsides south of Macon. We learned why, with reason, these wines are being praised.
Plenty of good food and wine in Beaujolais
(Ed. note: click on images to view larger)
Hold a glass of good beaujolais up to the light and you’ll see why winemakers talk about the charm of its colour, a rich ruby that inspires good cheer. To the nose it is fruity, in the best winemaking sense of the word – not sweet but filled with notes of just-picked summer fruits, cherries, strawberries and raspberries or plums and apricots, as well as irises. Drink it with friends over an informal, comfortable meal – with a homemade terrine and chicken in cream sauce – in a local bistro or auberge. The talk flows and the food is good, and you suddenly understand what beaujolais is all about and why it has remained popular for decades.
”It’s a modern wine,” says producer Dominque Piron of Domaine Piron, “not woody, not sweet, not difficult to drink.” The alcohol content is generally low, a bonus in this age of wines that are too often high in alcohol content because of warmer climates, making them poor companions for meals. “But there’s this paradox, in that we’re a little bit medieval in our approach to the vines,” he smiles.
Morgon, Beaujolais, a land of hills
No wonder. With more than half of the slopes at 20+ percent gradients, and one of the world’s highest density plantings at 9-10,000 plants per hectare, the use of machines is limited and grapes are handpicked. In this, the region resembles much of Swiss grapegrowing country.
There are in fact close ties between growers in Beaujolais and Geneva, Vaud and parts of Valais. On opening night of Arvinis I started to greet Claude Geoffray of Château Thivin, who had welcomed me a few days earlier and shown me around his vineyards. But he was deep in conversation with Raymond Paccot, one of Switzerland’s most respected wine producers, from Féchy, about new pruning methods Geoffray was adopting on Paccot’s advice.
Geoffray’s son took his degree in viticulture at Changins, near Nyon in Switzerland, married a woman from Valais, then joined the family domain in Beaujolais.
Dominique Piron had just decided to forego a trip to Crans-Montana in Valais, Switzerland to see friends, share a meal and sample wines; his wife, American oenologist Kristine Mary, was returning from a family visit to the US. Asked about close ties to Swiss winemakers he agreed, “we’re like cousins.”
Mark Platt, Multistack, left and Michael Christensen, US State Dept, right (click on images to view larger)
Updated 16:30 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Wednesday was the 39th annual Earth Day in the US, which explains much of the flurry of talks, blogs and activities designed to get us thinking along greener, cleaner lines. The Huffington Post carried blogs by filmmaker Robert Redford on taking a stand, and author Michael Pollen, who praises the new vegetable garden at the White House, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt.
Meanwhile, here in Geneva, the US Mission to the United Nations put into operation a piece of new technology that will contribute significantly to Geneva’s reputation as a green city and to the United States government’s efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of its embassies and missions. The State Department sees Geneva as an ideal place to spotlight emerging green technologies because of its reputation as an environmental centre, US staff say, but also because during the past four years the Mission has developed excellent working relations with the canton’s energy department and Geneva’s SIG (industrial services) department. “They’re very forward thinking,” says Michael Christensen, a green engineer from the US State Department, who praises SIG’s efforts “to do everything they can to prevent fossil fuel use.”
Hillary Clinton met with international diplomats in Washington to discuss “Greening Diplomacy” where she mentioned the US Geneva’s Mission and its new air conditioning system.
Geneva’s US Mission goes for maglev air conditioners
The Mission’s new air conditioning system gives the US an opportunity to showcase cutting edge technology, an air cooling chiller system that uses no lubrication oil and a minimal amount of refrigerant in comparison to typical chilling systems. It is a long-awaited commercial application of a solution to a decades-old engineering dilemma of how to maintain a magnetic levitation motor shaft within microscopic tolerances. Magnetic levitation dates back to the 1940s, but nanotechnology was required for this step.
Newspapers disappearing
Updated 14 April 07:45 Lake Geneva region, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Everyone knows banks are in desperate shape. Curiously, few people seem to realize that the newspapers bringing them this news are in equally dire straits. And it’s not just newspapers: it’s the news industry.
The Boston Globe is the latest US newspaper in the hangman’s noose, with staff told at the start of April that it is likely to lose $89 million in 2009. Its owner, the New York Times, can no longer afford to keep it alive, given the New York paper’s own $57.8 million deficit at the end of 2008. Other city newspapers in the US are lining up on the scaffold. Already hung: the Seattle Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, two of the nation’s oldest papers, both now closed and others such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, filing for bankrupty.
The US debate over the real impact of the Internet on print media
The closings and threatened ones are sparking a lively debate over the need for newspapers and the media in general in an Internet age, and where the news industry is headed. The problem isn’t just the Internet: US newspapers’ advertising revenue fell 16.6 percent in 2008.
Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post jumped in this week over plans announced by Associated Press (which is owned by its member newspapers) for an industry initiative to protect online news. For Huffington, the argument is about whether journalists “embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.”
It’s a debate that is beginning to reach Switzerland but here, for now the discussion appears to be more about media surviving commercially by developing non-news business while still offering journalism. This is not a new debate – think of the media owners in the US who’ve had baseball teams – but in a small country with little competition, the changing role of the media bears examination.
A three-part special on housing and the international population in the Lake Geneva region: part 2
- Nominal GDP in the Lake Geneva region, Wuest & Partner index for aptmts, houses: 1998=100
Rents, Lake Geneva region increases compared to Switzerland, 2007
(Also see part 1:Geneva, Vaud apartment hunters struggle to find a place to call home)
Ed. note: click on images to enlarge
True or false
Rents have climbed continually in the Lake Geneva region
Mostly true, with rent increases outstripping those in the rest of Switzerland since 2002, when the rental market momentarily slipped.
True or false
The sale price of homes has climbed continually in the Lake Geneva region in the past 20 years
Overall, yes, up 179 percent from 1977-2008, but up 30 percent in 30 years in real terms: with cost of living increases taken into account. The increase has not been steady, however, with a big dip in the early 1990s, Swiss-wide, when easier mortgages led to a sudden bubble in prices, which then burst. Stricter rules were put in place: a home-owner’s debt cannot exceed 80 percent of the value of the property.
A three-part special on housing and the international population in the Lake Geneva region: part 1
(Also see part 2: Myth and reality: how housing in the Lake Geneva region adds up)
Geneva, Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland’s population grew by 1.6 percent in 2007, the highest rate since 1963, thanks to immigration fueled by a healthy economy and the country progressively opening up to the Schengen Area free movement of labour, starting in 2002. One result was to put more pressure on the demand for housing, especially in the Lake Geneva region where demand has long been greater than supply.
A new peak in housing demand in 2008 in canton Geneva coincided with new construction falling off, leaving Geneva with an apartment vacancy rate of 0.25 percent on 1 June 2008, the date when national figures are compiled.
Some 1,200 wines from 110 Valais producers are ready to be sampled at this largest of Swiss wine festivals, where 10,000 people are expected. The special guest wine production area this year, for the festival’s 15th year, is St Emilion, France – doubly special because the producers’ group there, the Collège des Vins de St-Emilion is offering Vinea a first: open-air tastings of its wines, offered to the public. The festival will also be showcasing different risottos from neighbouring Italy, Nez du Vin aroma kits, and there are activities for children as well as hikes through the vineyard and guided tours along the Vinea street. The entry fee is CHF30 (all wines tasted for free as long as you have a Vinea 2008 glass).
“My philosophy is simple: I like the world of music, and there I think global because you have to let yourself think big enough. But I drink “local,” Daniel Rossellat smiles, raising a glass of very good Chasselas from the vineyards near Paleo, the festival he founded more than 35 years ago. “I always taste the local wines. In 30 years I’ve been to pretty much every country that makes it.” He travels internationally year-round to listen to and find music groups.
Daniel Rossellat is still the boss at Paleo, which has grown from its first crowd of 1,800 to an annual sellout of 225,000 tickets for 120 concerts, and his stamp clearly marks it. But he says he is gradually making way for his successor. Or successors, for the team that is in charge has already shown their mettle, he believes, led by Jacques Monnier, who has co-responsibility for the festival’s programme. [Ed.note: see the 23 July Le Temps interview with Monnier on YouTube, about his favourite groups, at the end of this interview - in French]
Rossellat, who is known in local circles as a wine cognoscente, agreed to talk to GenevaLunch about his favourite bottles, at a hotel in Nyon where afterwards he would be glad-handing local business leaders in his role as would-be candidate for the town council in Nyon. While some people have expressed surprise at his shift from music festival man to politician, for Rossellat it’s a logical evolution. “We’re lucky to be a European model. We could be arrogant about our success but we believe we must continue to innovate. And we have to use our authority to encourage our employees and the public – and the region – to assume social responsibility.” Paleo won a Midem Green award in 2008, the latest in a string of awards for its environmental efforts.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – "Undeclared money is a global problem. It’s not a Swiss issue. It’s not an issue regarding any particular Swiss bank," argues Philip Marcovici,
partner and international taxation specialist at Baker & McKenzie
in Zurich. Marcovici spoke to GenevaLunch following the early July
request by the US Treasury Department to federal judges in Florida for access to UBS bank files on American citizens.
"The things that are going on, with the IRS and and with other tax authorities in various countries, are symptomatic of a greater situation,
with information moving around more and the world increasingly
inter-connected. The message going out is that if you have not been
complying you had better think twice." Voluntary disclosure to the IRS,
for example, is a far better option than waiting to be caught by the US
tax authorities.
Governments such as the US and Germany are not taking the right path
to finding a solution to the problem of undeclared wealth, however, he
believes. By attacking banks and one or two jurisdictions that offer banking secrecy, "you’re not getting cooperation. There is
a long history of why families have made use of bank secrecy to protect their wealth and the interests of their families that is not related to tax
avoidance. Many families have undeclared money that goes back to world
war two or before. For example, when some families fled Germany and other countries in Europe during the second world war, assets were left in ’secrecy countries’ to protect the interests of the families involved."
Part one: Why a family goes to school
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Last Friday 37 family business students at IMD in Lausanne, one of Europe’s top business schools, packed up and headed home with new ideas about moving the family company into the future. The group was the latest to follow a week-long programme for "global leading family businesses," according to IMD-Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch Family Business Research Center co-director Joachim Schwass.
In an era of giant multinationals and publicly-owned companies family businesses may seem like an anachronism, but nothing is further from the truth, argues Schwass. The public corporation as we know it goes back to the early 1900s, he says. At that time two Harvard professors wrote about the need to separate ownership from management.
These new public companies powered business through the 20th century but in the last 5-10 years we have been seeing constraints on the corporate system, he believes, with demands for limits on huge salaries and boards being called to greater accountability. UBS, for example, today announced the immediate implementation of new governance rules that draw a clear line between its executive board and its management.
"Families don’t need this heavy board structure. You trust yourself, you know what risks to take and you get to know your business over time. And your thinking is very long term, the next generation and beyond – you want to give back and you have a knowledge base. So we’re really coming back to the roots of our capitalist system. The rewards are higher for everyone. Family businessses are taking back the role that governments are finding increasingly difficult to manage.
"The problem is that family businesses bring the family and the business together and if they think ahead, plan ahead, their system can work, but it doesn’t happen automatically."
Age 50 is a critical time for many company founders, Schwass points out, the moment when the owner starts to see the next generation as just power-driven, and that can cause problems. "The first generation needs to be able to say, ‘here is a platform and it’s your choice’ and then motivate them." Schwass laughs at a common scenario, where for years a parent "comes home every night and complains about the unions or this and that, someone stealing business – and then they turn to the children and say, ‘and some day this will all be yours!’ Too many conversations are badly handled."
The lessons learned by families who turn to IMD for help apply equally well to most family businesses, he says. For a start, such firms tend to follow a predictable development pattern. Typically, one person founds the company and he or she remains the indispensable "I" at the centre. The second generation is often the children, siblings: a small family that functions as a team, marked by a need for equality. By the third generation, the family has grown to include cousins, and an "Us and them" attitude has developed, where inequality becomes part of the company’s operating system.
"You’ve got built-in conflicts and about 80% of family companies fail" when the founder passes on the company, says Schwass. "In the second generation, the team is characterized as very close" but by the third generation, with cousins, differences stand out. This is hard for families to deal with because "in an ‘Us’ culture you’re punished if you’re different but in ‘Us and them’ it’s good to be different. A company by this stage needs that wider pool of more diversified talent and personalities. Another 10% of companies fail at this point, says Schwass. "Once the cousins are brought in you have to have governance." IMD tries to help them make what Schwass calls a paradign shift. "Where a family sees names and history, we see structures, strategy."
Schwass himself is part of a family business so his input is based on
both academic work and personal experience. "Globalization and the
Internet have done a lot to every company. I was doing business in
Australia, China and elsewhere and I constantly travelled. I always had to go to them, but now
clients are brought to us." This impact of a changing world, coupled
with new research, might make it seem that family businesses are facing
new challenges, but Schwass says this is not at the root of problems.
"Underneath,
fundamentally, the needs of family-owned businesses have not changed
because they are based on human issues, values and behaviour. The
problems arise because you are directly involved, either as an owner,
or family member or manager."
IMD starts by helping its family business students understand why they need to avoid building their companies around an individual. At the outset it may be normal for the company’s capital to be primarily the person who founded it, so a "revolution" is needed to make that one person-centred approach "redundant." The business needs to shift, using "evolution" to create a system that will replace the individual, at the same time making a strong commitment to solid growth. A new programme focuses on helping families make the generational transition.
The 20-year-old Family Business Center uses its research base and
case studies to help companies understand this. Schwass says the
research is far richer than it was even 5-10 years ago, and it is
increasingly international.
IMD worked closely, for example, with an Indian company, the Murugappa Group based in Chennai, India, which rethought its structure. "If you look at the Indian family-owned business model there might be six sons, so the founder sets up six businesses." Trust and equality are important in Indian society and this structure reflects it, he believes. But typically, once the founder is gone the companies, previously closely linked, start splitting up. In Mulogappa’s case, the family’s success has led to it winning one of IMD’s family business awards.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Patrick Chappatte’s popular cartoons from the International Herald Tribune are the newest addition to GenevaLunch news coverage. Starting today, 25 June, Chappatte’s editorial cartoons will appear twice weekly and you’ll be able to search the collection that appears here. He also works in French and German, for Le Temps and NZZ am Sonntag.
Chappatte is the author of two successful cartoon books in English that collect some of his best newspaper work, Globalized, published in February 2007 and Another World, 2004.
His view of the world will resonate for many Lake Geneva region readers in part because he shares the kind of international background that many of us have. In his own words he "is an editorial cartoonist. He is also a curious blend of Swiss and Lebanese origins, born in Pakistan, raised in Singapore and in Switzerland, and he now lives in Geneva after three years spent in New York. He has an equal passion for World Affairs and dark bitter chocolate." He also has an extraordinary talent for condensing into a concise cartoon message the strong emotions that world events provoke for many of us.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Women are not a minority nor should they be considered part of a diversity programme, argues Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, co-author of Why Women Mean Business. Women in the 21st century are rapidly taking their place as an integral part of the business world.
Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of 20-first, a gender consultancy company baesd in France. Her co-author, Alison Maitland, former Financial Times writer who is today an independent journalist, offers three key reasons why women are changing the face of business and with it, society. Women are now a significant portion of the international labour pool, and six of 10 university graduates are female. They make up 50% of the work force and are 30-40% of management. Maitland notes that the management figure varies enormously between countries.
Women are also moving into the driver’s seat when it comes to car and other consumer purchases: they are the decision-makers in two-thirds of car purchases in Japan and 80% of all consumer spending in the United States, says Maitland, who asks, "Are companies really grasping the role that female consumers are playing?" In the UK women aged 18-24 are the single largest group of web users on the Internet.
Maitland’s third point is that women and gender balance are good for economic performance. Of the eight million new jobs created globally since 2000, six million have been filled by women. Companies with women managers and women on boards have been shown to perform better than those without, she argues.
The two authors were part of a 5 June panel discussion sponsored by GWIT (Geneva Women in International Trade) on "Why Women Mean Business." They were joined by three Lake Geneva region executives, Gianni Ciserani of Procter % Gamble, Paolo Fellin or Caterpillar and Peter Lorange, who retired at the end of March 2008 as president of IMD in Lausanne.
Photos (click on images to view larger): top – front, Peter Lorange, left to right, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, Gianni Ciserani, Alison Maitland. Bottom, Paolo Fellin.
Gex, France (GenevaLunch) – For three days this week, Gex is home to a remarkable colour experience, a luminarium.
Alan Parkinson, their inventor and head of Architects of Air which rents the walk-through structures for events, is a native of Nottingham, England who lives in Gex. He has baptized these "luminariums" because the tent mazes, made of coloured vinyl strips, play with natural light to create a cathedral window effect.
"It’s like making stained glass, but with plastic," says Parkinson as he tugs a bit of plastic here, a bit there. The engineering is nevertheless impressive.
Children from the St Jeanne d’Arc school in Gex tumble out of the structure in their stocking feet. What was the best part, they are asked.
"The blue room!" they quickly agree.
The adult with them says she preferred the red room. "That was cool, too, says a small girl.
To someone arriving at the Perdtemps square at the top of Gex (look for the church spire and go a little higher to find it), first impressions are of a giant and rather elegant bouncy castle. Stepping inside, it feels like you are inside a giant and complex children’s balloon. It smells like a balloon.
But preconceived notions quickly disappear as the colours and extraordinary light experience take over.
A sense of disorientation sets in, but it’s soothing rather than disorienting. Parkinson says that his luminariums have had more than a million visitors but he can remember only one person panicking in the colours maze.
Parkinson began to build his creations in 1985 and now has three to four designs that circulate at any one time, mostly for large city festivals. This week, his latest, called Amococo, has been open to schools for two days and Saturday it is open to the public, for free from 12:00-20:00, as part of the Les Impostures arts festival.
The idea came to him, Parkinson says, when he was working in England in social services and was asked to repair a tent. His structures today are far more complex than your average tent and use a special vinyl made for him in France that he smiles is "very forgiving."
Each structure lasts about three years. He designs them – "I have the idea in my head" is his only explanation – and they are then cut and mostly glued together by members of his 15-person team.
The workshop is in Nottingham and his events team is scattered around Europe.
A walk-through might take a half hour or less, but you can easily spend longer. Parkinson says he encourages people to just lie down and go to sleep. There is a zen aspect to the experience and it is easy to imagine drifting off in a pink or purple corner. "Sometimes I think I know where I am," muses Parkinson, and then I suddenly find myself on the other side."
Les Impostures, Gex festival in France, Saturday 31 May, with dance, theatre, exhibits and more, 12:00-20:00. Free
Photos: Ellen Wallace. Click on images to view larger. More images in the GenevaLunch photo album, "Luminarium."
Also see the GenevaLunch Iris photo album, with an additional 30-plus images of the Chateau de Vullieren grounds and glorious irises!
(click on images here to view larger)
Vullierens, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The new water gardens won’t look like much for five or six years, the new wooded walk with its masses of bluebells and 6,000 new hyacinthes will also need years to develop fully.
That doesn’t bother Robert Bovet, who takes a languid approach to time.
Bovet has just offered the gardens at his family Chateau de Vullierens sur Morges a facelifting that he knows will need several years to mature. He smiles and points to a giant 250-year-old sequoia brought back from the United States by an ancestor as evidence that time passes at a different rate here.
Bovet brings in Swiss English gardener Ruttledge
Bovet in 2007 hired John Ruttledge, an Englishman whose garden design business is near Yverdon, to redesign the relatively young 18th century gardens and make better use of the 100 hectares the domain covers.
Photos, above: Many of the irises are coming out late this year which means that by the end of May they will be in full colour.
This has been home to the Bovet and de Mestral families for 700
years: the chateau celebrates its 700th anniversary in 2009. The once powerful Vaud families owned several "cousin" chateaus that included St Saphorin sur Morges and Vufflens, and they could go from Lake Geneva to the Jura foothills without leaving their land.
Robert, the current owner of Chateau de Vullierens, has one foot in the past, from his father’s side, but the other is very much in the international present. He is the son of a Swiss father and an American mother. He spent his first 12 years in South Africa before being shipped off to England to boarding school. He later attended university in Geneva and the US, and for several years he has lived in Switzerland.
Chateau is home to iris gardens
For more than 50 years, a short time in a chateau’s history, this
has also been home to Switzerland’s most famous iris gardens, which opened to the public in 1955. From the road, the chateau is nearly invisible despite its imposing architecture and extraordinary trees. From the other side, it dominates a hillside with a sweep of vineyards, meadows and scattered villages that run down to Lake Geneva. Lausanne sparkles in the distant sunlight like a magical jewel.
Photo: rose gardens and the Russian princess topless tower
Bovet has gradually been restoring the chateau, which is a Swiss national monument. Most of the work is what he refers to laughingly as "boring things" like roofing and heating. "We’ll now attack the facade," he told a group of visitors at the inauguration of the new gardens, with clear enthusiasm for details such as whether or not shutters, added at a point when they became fashionable, should remain.
He is debating whether to restore the missing top to one of the towers, he says. "A visiting Russian princess said she couldn’t see the Mont Blanc from her room," so her hosts graciously removed the offending stones 150 or so years ago, leaving an unnaturally stubby tower.
Bovet is carrying on a family passion for the chateau gardens, building up the iris collection, which this year has 17 new varieties. Today there are 380 varieties of iris, with 15,000 rhizomes that burst into thousands and thousands of magnificent blooms in May and June. The chateau has won several awards for its hybrids.
In addition to the irises, the gardens are famous for their day lilies (Hemerocalles), which begin to bloom mid-June.
But the gardens and park are far more than flowerbeds: there are several formal gardens that Ruttledge has revived with new designs, replanting and tidying tired areas. The many sculptures by Manuel Torres are shown to greater advantage.
There are two new, major additions, both well worth exploring. One is the woodland walk, 800 metres along a path, under high, arching trees, to a natural forest pond. The path once carried riders from the chateau to neighbouring Vufflens-le-Chateau. The other is the water garden with its water-loving plants, viewed from the old stone bridge that arches over it. Rutledge’s wife Rachel sketched out the garden design; her artwork is on display in the chateau’s art gallery. The gallery also holds an exhibit of work by seven area women during the iris garden display in May and June.
The woods, with several trees that are hundreds of years old, held a special attraction for a recent guest, celebrity investor Georges Soros. He participated in a conference in Crans-Montana, Valais recently, then held a meeting in the chateau’s "farmhouse" known as the Portes des Iris, built in the 16th century and a working farm until 1992. Today, it serves as a sumptuous setting for meetings and receptions. By the time Soros had finished his Swiss meetings, says Bovet, he said the only thing he wanted was to "sleep under those trees." Bovet, in the family tradition of accommodating host, had a mattress put under one of the trees that is hundreds of years old. Soros slept and slept, Bovet laughs – and then he recalls his huge relief two weeks later because Soros wasn’t there when a giant branch suddenly crashed to the ground, exactly where the wealthy man had spent so many hours sleeping.
Today Bovet is counting on the garden’s facelift to bring in more visitors, but he also hopes to encourage people to buy more irises, especially the double-blooming variety for which the chateau is quickly gaining a reputation. A spring blooming session is followed by another in early September and if the autumn is a long one they will continue to bloom for weeks. A quick peek at other visitors confirms that many of them are noting down flower numbers in order to be able to order them later. It’s easy to see why: these are flowers with which you can easily fall in love.
- Chateau de Vullierens sur Morges, "Floralies d’iris" (iris show) visiting hours: 9:00-18:00 daily to 15 June
- entry: CHF4-12
- tearoom during opening hours, with light lunches
Irises can be ordered online from the chateau’s new web site for garden-lovers.
Ed. note: Leman Events is hosting a lunch, presentation and guided tour, in English, 1 June at the chateau. Details
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Delightfully small and enormously smart, a hot little jumping microrobot at EPFL may be leaving home to save, literally, the world – or at least those in danger.
Photo: Alain Herzog, EPFL, reproduced with permission
The new robot, introduced this week, could be fitted out with tiny sensors to explore rough, inaccessible terrain or to aid in search
and rescue operations. "This biomimetic form of jumping is unique
because it allows micro-robots to travel over many types of rough
terrain where no other walking or wheeled robot could go," explains
EPFL’s Dario Floreano, who heads the research team. The tiny robots "could be
fitted with solar cells to recharge between jumps and deployed in
swarms for extended exploration of remote areas on Earth or on other
planets."
Mirko Kovac at EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems this week presented the microrobot to an international robotics conference in Pasadena, California in the US. It is minuscule, at 7 grams, and can jump 1.4 metres, or more than 27 times its body size, a feat that EPFL says takes it 10 times farther than any existing jumping robot can manage.
The official explanation from EPFL of how the flying robot works: small jumping animals such as fleas, locusts, grasshoppers and frogs
use elastic storage mechanisms to slowly charge and quickly release
their jumping energy. In this way, they can achieve very powerful jumps
and very high accelerations. The jumping robot uses the
exact same principle, charging two torsion springs via a small 0.6-gram
pager motor and a cam. In order to be able to optimize the jumping
performance, the legs can be adjusted for jumping force, takeoff angle
and force profile during the acceleration phase. The tiny battery on
board allows it to make up to 320 jumps at intervals of 3 seconds.
This latest model is part of a series of flying robots under developmentat the Swiss polytechnic institute. In addition to the tiny indoor ones, the research team is working on larger outdoor models that will not need GPS.
Kovac will also demonstrate the robot in the "robot zoo" at the 4th
International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines in
Cleveland, Ohio 5 June 2008.
Ed. note: if Kovac and the EPFL team haven’t named the robot yet, my vote goes to Jumpin’ Jack Flash, with a nod to the Rolling Stones.
[Update, link to IMD's webcast featuring Warren Buffet and Eiran Wertheimer, "How to grow wealth in a responsible and sustainable manner," 42 minutes. Register to view 20 May discussion between Buffett, whose company recently invested in Wertheimer's family business, and Wertheimer, about how and why they came together.]
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The bise winds blew and blew Tuesday in Lausanne, and the influence of Warren Buffett, the world’s richest man according to Forbes magazine, also swept through the city.
Buffett, as head of Berkshire Hathaway (BH), an investment firm based in Omaha, Nebraska, visited business school IMD to help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Family Business Program and to field questions from MBA students eager to know what lies behind Buffett’s success. [Ed. note: scroll down for nuggets of wisdom shared by Buffett]
"He was so easy-going – I was very impressed," says Pedro Almeido, an MBA student from Portugal. Patrick Cerf, an MBA student from Basel, echoed his sentiment. "It was hard to believe, he is so successful but he is so natural."
Buffett opened the floor to the MBA students’ questions, and for Almeido, his answers were honest, forthright, and left the students with a remarkable example. "Look at the way he doesn’t ‘manage’ his CEOs! He told us about a company he bought seven years ago [after an initial contact, dinner, and signing within days]. In seven years, he’s had no news, never heard from the man again!" And yet, BH has amassed a fortune from such investments, he notes.
Photo: Pedro Almeido, IMD MBA student from Portugal
Almeido, who was clearly feeling inspired, says he took away two valuable lessons from the session. "You have to love what you do. And priorities: if you commit this much to your career you have to think about balance, about your relationships with people. You have to manage your passion, but also your priorities in life."
During a later press conference with journalists from around Europe Buffett fielded a question from a Financial Times journalist about what he thinks business schools should do differently, since he has been critical of business schools in the past. For finance studies, he said, there are only two important questions. "How do you value a business and how do you know the markets." Beyond that, MBA students need just one more thing. "The ability to communicate both orally and in writing – we need more of both of these. I run into people [who can do this] and they can have an enormous impact."
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Financial executives who say the end is in sight are "overly optimistic – things continue to be pretty challenging in the markets," says Brady Dougan, CEO of Credit Suisse Group. The first two quarters of 2008 will see banks continuing to focus on risk reduction, with "estimates that writedowns related to the subprime mortgage sector alone will total $250 billion." That figure might sound staggering, but "writedowns at the three global institutions hardest hit by the crisis had already exceeded $100b at the end of March."
A key element in risk reduction is shifting away from mid-term returns on funds, what Dougan refers to as the bar bell: "Long-term is okay, very short-term is ok, but the timeframe on medium-term has changed. We have dramatically shortened times on money market funds." In seven days the bank can now get back 50% of these funds.
Dougan’s remarks were made Friday to a group of business leaders and bankers,
the American International Club of Geneva, about his
bank and his industry in the wake of the financial crisis which developed only six weeks after he took the helm at Switzerland’s second
largest bank. "The industry won’t be returning to business as it was," he emphasized. "Without a doubt, the reputation of our industry has taken a beating. The financial industry will be under scrutiny from shareholders, regulators, clients and the public to address the issues raised by the crisis."
Part of the change could come in the form of greater regulation but
governments are moving cautiously, and "rightly so," he believes
because an over-zealous approach could reduce banks’ abilities to
foster economic growth just as it is most needed. The greater change
could well come from within the banking industry. "It’s time for us to
address the issues raised by the increasing complexity of financial
instruments and investment products."
Valais, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Wednesday night in villages near the resort of Crans-Montana farmers and friends cheered, wine glasses in hand, as Spring was officially declared in the Swiss Alps by those who know the mountainside best.
[Ed.note: click on images to view larger.]
The fighting cows were let out of their barns, with the "girls" torn between wanting to fight and enjoying their first green grass in months. They did plenty of both.
You’ve read right: these are cows, not bulls, and they like to fight in Spring. Competitions in arenas to watch them fight are a popular Valais pastime, with a certain amount of betting going on. The finals of a series of cantonal competitions in Valais take place Sunday, 11 May in Sion, when the Valais queen will be crowned in front of an expected crowd of 10,000 people.
These are not animals pushed to perform for humans: the cows fight even when left to themselves.
Most of the cows are pregnant when May arrives. Hormones are doing interesting things, the grass smells great even to humans with weak noses and the cows have been cooped up all winter.
Send them outside and they test their social hierarchy muscles.
Every herd has a natural leader, the queen, who is determined over the course of several weeks, through fights. She is the strongest and smartest, the one who leads the herd to the best grass and helps it survive tough times outside when summer storms whip the mountain peaks.
The fighting cows are one of Switzerland’s great natural wonders. The short-legged black and dark brown cows belong to the Val d’Herens breed, beef cows that are kept here mainly as milk cows. Most of their milk ends up in the raclette cheeses whose texture and flavour vary from one Swiss valley to the next. The cows are extraordinarily adept at navigating Alpine slopes and finicky summer weather that can bring drought, violent thunderstorms and even July or August snows. They stay in barns for the winter, taking it easy and munching on straw during the early months of their pregnancies, which begin in November.
They have a mid-mountain interim period in Spring, wearing those large bells that tourists love. The bells correspond in size and weight to the animal’s size, so a farmer can tune in to where each animal is, as if each has its particular ringtone. When they go outside in May it is only for the evening at first. After a few days, they stay out for the
day.
"Their joints are stiff the first day or two," says Fuchs, who explains that during the winter he takes them out of their stalls for short periods.
Other breeds of cows provide more milk and therefore more Swiss cheese. Most Val d’Herens herds have some of these good milkers, often gentle, quiet gray cows that look like distant cousins to deer. The gray cows bring a bit of order and peace to the feisty Val d’Herens herds.
Good and sensible as these other cows are, the ones that farmers in the Swiss Alps love are the fighting cows. Going out with farmer Bernard Fuchs, his neighbours and friends Wednesday evening gave a glimpse of the man-animal relationship that has deep Swiss roots.
The cows were delighted to move, after being cooped up, and their main interest at first was grass. They frequently wandered up to people standing on the fringes of their electrically fenced area. The cows sniffed, said hello, were curious. Farmers, busy discussing agricultural politics, absent-mindedly scratched cows on foreheads.
And then, suddenly, a cow paws the dirt. A cow wanting a fight often snorts and stands in an unmistakably aggressive pose. She bellows. Nearby cows trot away rapidly if they aren’t interested in taking her on. She wanders away. Seconds later dust flies – two cows are going at each other, head to head, horns locked. Two men run up, shouting at them and tapping them with light sticks to get the cows to separate. A bit of tussling is okay, but serious fighting can injure one of them and the younger cows need to learn this. At the same time, the small crowd gets excited and cheers of "Hup! Hup!" echo across the field.
One of the younger cows suddenly stops on a high bare spot and looks around her. "She’s saying she wants to fight and they others are saying no," chuckles Fuchs. We watch as nearby cows move away sharply. The belligerent cow watches them, then abruptly trots after them. "They’ve said no, they don’t want to fight, and now she’s making it clear that means she’s won," points out Fuchs, who owns some 30 cows.
Lea, an 11-year-old cow, comes up to say hello. She’s the queen of the herd and so far, none of the others have tried to challenge her authority. She calmly goes back to eating.
The first two evenings outside the cows leap for joy and kick up their heels when it’s time to go back to the barn. Fighting and fresh grass can wear a girl out. A few weeks from now, when they are used to the great outdoors and the green grass diet again, these cows, hefty as they are at 500kg, will run up the mountainside at an impressive speed. Every year they look just like happy kids getting out of school for the summer.
- Related: May 2008 WRS story about fighting cows
- Ellen Wallace’s photo collection (31 images) on flickr of a Swiss fighting cow competition
