Читать книгу The Organic Garden - Allan Shepherd - Страница 5

I want to start with a story – if you are sitting comfortably.

Once upon a time a contented shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier kept a flock of sheep alive on a hillside of wind-blown soil, in a corner of France almost lost and best forgotten. There were no trees on this land, nor were there any of the joys that trees would have brought with them. There were no springs of water and no streams. No plants. Or animals to eat them. And as there was nothing there to take pleasure or profit from, there were no people either. Apart, that is, from those who had to live there, who had no choice in the matter. And of these people most were as harsh and bitter as the wind that swept through the gaps in the walls of their blank stone houses.

Although he could have been easily discouraged by this landscape, Elzéard was not interested in the reality that was. Only with the reality that was yet to be. Content to be alone, not bitter or lonely in his isolation, longing for nothing, Elzéard spent his unoccupied hours planting acorns – wherever he found an empty desolate spot that deserved to be occupied by timber and leaves. With no wife or family to occupy his time, nor matters of important business to attend to, nor entertainment to distract him, with the years on his side, he realised he could plant a forest, and did so.

As the acorns grew into saplings and the saplings into trees, he noticed how the raindrops no longer ran along the surface of the compacted soil to puddle the hillside with damp craters. But instead ran down the leaves and the branches and the trunks of his oaks, into the soil, where the water stayed, until the earth could hold no more. Then it bubbled its way out again, through springs and into one of the many streams that now ran through the forest.

When the leaves fell he watched the worms and the ants break them up and drag them into the earth. He witnessed plants erupt from seeds he had not planted.

When the leaves fell he watched the worms and the ants break them up and drag them into the earth. He witnessed plants erupt from seeds he had not planted. He did not care how they had got there. Perhaps they had re-awakened from a deep slumber, or maybe they were fresh migrants arrested in flight from some other place and shackled to the earth by his trees. That they were there was the only thing that mattered, and that insects came to feed on their nectar and that birds came to feed on the insects. And that owls returned to hunt the mice that ate the seeds of the flowers. And that rabbits and deer came to eat the plants. And finally that humans returned in their tens of thousands to take pleasure in the amazing and mysterious natural phenomenon that was Elzéard Bouffier’s forest.

The original version of The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono is a golden cloth of literature compared to the tailored square of material I have presented above. I haven’t really done it justice, so make it the next book you buy. What I will try to do in this book is give you the skills and ambition to have your own back garden Elzéard Bouffier moment. Not to plant a forest! Just to take a dead space and transform it into something living and wonderful. A good place for people, plants and animals.