Much may be made of a derelict farmyard
We left our farm in the Bourbonnais, the centre of France, sixteen years ago, having sold it to a Anglo-French couple who have since become good friends. Which means they keep us up to date with local news, and sometimes send us photos. We haven’t been back to visit for three years, so the latest batch have come as a wonderful surprise. Autumn colour was one theme in our planting – though the main thrust was more oak woods (with generous grants from the French government). The Auvergnat flora (we were on the fringe of the Auvergne) had little to offer in autumn. You might be lucky with a spindle going red, or a field maple a cheerful yellow, but bocage, the landscape of field and hedge and copse familiar in Normandy, is generally sombre. No fireworks.
So here and there on the farm where the mean gritty soil held enough clay or humus to retain a little moisture, I seized the chance to plant trees I couldn’t grow in England. American trees, in the main, that need acid soil and hope for hot summers and cold winters. The first candidates were the sugar and red maples that give the blaze to New England in the fall. Maples and oaks came first, with some larch (seldom seen in the Bourbonnais) and a few cryptomerias for evergreen contrast.
Twenty-five years later the scheme is working – indeed some of the trees need thinning. There is one little valley on the farm where five tracks meet at what I called the cricket ground; a calm flat green space where a dozen chaps in white flannels would look perfectly in place. Five substantial sugar maples are blazing there as I write. It is a shrine to something unstated (Botany? Diversity? America?). Elsewhere among the copses, the hedges, the sudden ridges and unreliable seasonal streams and ponds you come across a swamp cypress, a tulip tree, a Japanese maple or a scatter of yellow azaleas in their red autumn rig, all remnants of my absurd over-reaching, trying to garden the whole landscape.
It was the deer that put paid to it. They are almost as much of a problem in France as in parts of England, where the population is quite out of control. French law limited us to a cull of one or two a year (by kind permission of the préfet of the département). Their species, age and sex were specified, with a nasty amende if you thought a girl was a boy, or mistook senescence for puberty, or just shot too soon. Even the wild boar that laid waste to anything you prized, had a hunting season – and woe betide you confusing the calendar.
The most remarkable of the trees I planted in the 1990s is an Italian cypress by the front door, planted within a metre of the house, hence in a spot without moisture. It has grown in this time to 60 feet or even more, over twice the height of the house, retaining a perfect rocket shape as though it has been clipped. You can see it in the photo. An adder lives under the doorstep; could this be its secret? At least the deer stay away.
It’s high time, I reckon, that McDonald’s offered Bambiburgers. We eat too much beef; we have too many deer. QED.