Читать книгу The Allotment Book - Andi Clevely - Страница 34

Many allotment sites have a long history, sometimes stretching back centuries, and even millennia in the case of the floating gardens of Amiens, in the French region of Picardie.

Not far from the cathedral the River Somme flows through the city, across a low marshy floodplain that was first drained by the Romans when France was part of Gaul. They cultivated the reclaimed ground to produce vegetables to feed the troops, a practice that has continued to this day. The land is liable to flood, which replenished its fertility and often allowed three main crops a year to be raised by the market gardeners who developed the area and maintained its 55 kilometres (34 miles) of irrigation and drainage channels, or rieux. By the end of the 19th century there were more than a thousand growers, who sold their produce at the water market in Amiens every Saturday.

Today only a few commercial growers are left on 25 hectares (62 acres) of Les Hortillonages, as the floating gardens are known. The rest of the 300 hectares (741 acres) is divided into about 1,300 allotment plots and leisure gardens, often with a weekend cabin, and accessible mainly by shallow-bottomed boat through the intricate network of channels. It is possible to visit the gardens, as well as the surviving Saturday water market, throughout the year, and every June there is a medieval market and festival.