La Provence Verte is well-named. The rocky regions round Aix, the Montagne St Victoire and Les Baux are more populous and have inspired more painters with their ochre tones, but up in the higher parts of the Var a certain shade of green is universal: the colour of the Aleppo pine. Its forests are a monoculture over range after range of hills. They reach down to the Cote d’Azur and up towards the Alps, a rug of a pale green the colour of a Bramley apple, slender trees whose thin needles let the light filter through, reaching up on pale trunks the colour of aluminium. Dotted among them around habitations or cultivation come the dark verticals of cypresses, often so slim and so trim you would swear they were clipped. The two make one of the happiest, most apt, two-tree combinations I can imagine.
We are just home from a week with friends at a modest chateau deep in these hills, perhaps more strictly a maison de maître or a gentilhommière than a chateau; no pediments or battlements, a tall plain house of the 19th century, yellow with grey shutters, standing as it were on a podium in a grove of planes that must have been planted when the house was built. They reach as high as the roof, despite having been pollarded as youngsters to produce three or four soaring trunks. Their bark has peeled into a jigsaw of bone-yellow and grey and green, shading the gravel ready raked for a game of boules.
This limestone country is slashed by dramatic gorges. The little river Argens, which many days later will glide slowly into the sea at Fréjus, has cut a winding trench a hundred feet deep that goes by the mournful name of Le Vallon Sourn. Where the valley widens out and it reaches the light you are met by the different green of vineyards and the grey of olives.
A village here is a narrowing of the road into a gorge of tall narrow houses of that quiet ochre colour that dramatizes the blue and red of awnings over the hard chairs of the cafes. A tractor will fill the whole width of the street. You will smell its diesel and hear its trundling roar till the quiet floods back. On a still day of sunlight and dark shadows time dawdles here. And we follow the example of time.
