Trad is not only a single-minded scribbler, he has been known to actually do some gardening, and even had a go at designing gardens. Half of them have been in France, though intervention would in most cases be a truer word than design. Several of them are related to Trad’s other obsession, wines.
Only one has been on a landscape scale; my absurdly ambitious attempt to transform the fields, woods and riverside of a more or less abandoned farm, some 240 acres in all, into a unified and recognizable ‘landskip’. It had the potential: the west slope of a small river valley facing, on the eastern crest, the traces of a Roman oppidum, its earthen ramparts still apparent. The slope was a typical forest of the centre of France, largely a mixture of oak and cherry and hornbeam, until its latest owner felled the tall wild cherries and left their trunks in rotting heaps (having no idea how to sell them).
The numbskull then tried to extract the oaks, but was largely frustrated by the steepness of the land. His predecessors had more sense; they converted them to charcoal, a process that removes ninety per cent of the weight and maintains most of the value. Every twenty metres through the wood a wide black circle showed where a charcoal clamp had been. I pictured the scene fifty years before; the woodland noisy and smoky, loud with voices and axe blows, donkeys or mules ferrying the charcoal out to a wagon on the track at the top.
The little river Aumance at the bottom was too shallow to be much use. In spring it could float the raft we made of an old barn door, down past a sturdy little chateau to Vallon en Sully. The chateau (manoir is more accurate) has a stone plaque on the gateway claiming that it was the eastern most limit of an English advance from Gascony in the Hundred Years War.
Much of the farm was in a revolting state, covered with scraps of the black plastic used for covering straw bales and fiendish strands of barbed wire. Its recovery is entirely due to the generously constructive
