‘It’s not the Portuguese, it’s the new neighbours on the opposite side of the lane. They are preparing the ground for construction.’
‘What sort of construction? We live in a green belt. If we put two dustbins one on top of another here we can be fined.’
This was the stone-walled property that sat high on a rocky bluff looking out over the distant sea. A substantial property, this had also changed hands during my absence. We had yet to meet this man who I believed lived alone with two small children.
‘And the other folks, they’re cutting more trees.’
‘Not ours, I hope?’
‘No, their own, but they have already taken down seven or eight real old giants. He’s chainsaw-happy that biker.’
A refreshing interlude from the construction and concerns back at Appassionata was my visit, alas, without Michel, to a farm that carried both an organic certificate for its holding as well as an AOC for its oil, a rare example.
Since our one-day course managed by the Chambre d’Agriculture back in February, I had been putting out feelers here and there in search of a government-backed body that supported the move to organic farming. The ITAB, Institut Technique de l’Agriculture Biologique, gave me no results when I typed in oléiculture, olive cultivation. I searched the site of the FNAB, the National Federation for Organic Farming. They had no solutions for olive farmers. There really were none. Olive farming was a very small slice of the French cake. Even so, I knew that it was an area in which the nation wished to grow, yet nothing seemed to be about to aid and support those of us working in this field who wished to convert to bio. And then I came across Agrivert.
Agrivert was a very small organisation, eleven staff members throughout France, whose role it was to research organic alternatives to the more conservative French farming methods. This young team, I had been told, were working in all agricultural sectors except livestock. They were underpaid, understaffed and overworked. I telephoned and was invited to come along the next day to their office, which was in a boxe, one of a row of temporary builders’ shacks placed within a cavernous makeshift unit, seconds off the motorway near the airport at Nice. One cramped room situated on a landing was reached by iron stairs above a vast open space where, every morning at three o’clock, the largest of all Provençal flower markets opened its doors to every trader, florist and nursery-owner between Menton and Marseille. Flowers, plants, flown in, trucked or shipped in were the point of contact. The horticultural industry was big business along the sea-fringed Côte d’Azur. Over the past few years, clustering around this vast open space, most offices relating to the various local departments of agriculture had been relocated.
I climbed the echoing iron stairs and was greeted by a young lady with Celtic freckles, pale skin and frizzy hair as red as any in Ireland. This was Nadine. She was the technician who had organised this one-day get-together for a handful of bio olive farmers. As I moved to greet her, she shot past me, hurtling down the stairs, running out of the door.
‘I’ll be back’ was her parting call. ‘Go and join the others. They are having lunch.’
From down below in the ghostly stillness of the empty flower market, she was waving a braceleted arm signalling to an open door. ‘A plus tard, Madame Drinkwater,’ she called. See you later. Scrambling in her bag for keys, she dived into a decrepit bronze Peugeot.
I stepped through the open door into the tiny room crushed with seated farmers lunching at an oval table. At the sight of me, they fell silent. Each turned his head and quite literally gawped at me. I felt as though I had walked into a saloon bar in a western.
‘Bonjour,’ I hailed, smiling confidently, feeling daunted, a fish out of water. No one responded. I took the closest empty chair to the door and settled. The men maintained their silence but returned to their food, throwing surreptitious glances my way, sliding bottles and jars from one end of the table to the other as though playing an intense game of poker.
‘Perhaps the lady would like something,’ offered the youngest who was darting eyes my way with the expression of one who had never seen a woman before.
‘Thank you, I have eaten. Please, don’t let me interrupt you.’
Nine organic farmers (but only four, I learned later, had succeeded in gaining the official ticket) had gathered together to bemoan their fate, it seemed, and the lousy deals they were obtaining out there in the brutal world of commerce. Their lunch consisted of offerings from their various farms: a cloudy, unfiltered bottle of olive oil, organic brown bread that these men tore at with stubbled, blunted fingers that reminded me of tortoiseshell thimbles, pastes made from their own hand-picked olives and a couple of bottles of red wine that were chasing down the delights of chunks of Camembert and local goats’ cheeses. Among them was the very handsome young stagiaire, apprentice, who was dissecting a Golden Delicious apple into wafer-thin slices, each of which bore the crescent shape and translucence of a new moon. The men admired his bone-handled knife, which he had bought at a fair in Bordeaux, he boasted, glancing sneakily in my direction.
The accents in the tightly enclosed space were dense, hard to follow, even when they did not switch to Provençal.
I was the only woman in a world of straw-riddled farmers, out at a meeting where women – their kind of women – did not venture, aside from Nadine, ‘a technician’, and who in any case had disappeared off to the station to collect one of her colleagues arriving from their office in Avignon.
Their silence was eventually broken by a dark-haired, perplexed man, slightly desperate looking, seated opposite me who piped up with ‘All winter I have been asking myself, Shall I quit now? Shall I give up this lark? I’m barely scratching a living, not sufficient to feed the hens …’ He spoke fervently, anxiously.
Beside me, with downturned moustache and unruly hair, a goat-chewed individual began to speak, talking fast, tripping his words over everyone else’s and, once started, he rattled on, never pausing for breath throughout the remainder of the afternoon. There was no point on any subject about which he did not have an opinion, an answer, a salutary experience to share.
Our Celtic goddess returned with a clean-shaven, dark-haired man in his early thirties wearing a splendidly woven technicoloured jacket and, slung over his left shoulder, a more or less matching textile bag. Here was Vincent. Vincent, who had travelled from Avignon to impart to us his knowledge on the paramountcy of biodiversity in the olive groves, before leading us on a tour of a hinterland farm where, three years earlier, he had planted up bands of more than fifty Mediterranean wild flowers.
‘Biodiversity, the variety of life, of organisms, of species, in the habitats within which we are working is a bedrock of our philosophy. If anyone would like seeds from me, I am more than happy to supply them,’ he offered.
‘Yes, please,’ I raised my hand. ‘I’ll gladly buy some.’
‘Oh, they are not for sale. We are giving them away, or we will be in the autumn.’
The fellow alongside me pooh-poohed the idea of planting wild flowers in groves. ‘How can you lay down nets if there are flowers everywhere? Impossible! It’s not ornamental gardens we are cultivating here, but working fruit farms.’
Vincent ignored the comment and cranked up a very antiquated projector in preparation for a slide show. His soft-spoken live commentary was intended as an introduction, explanation, identification of the various plants endemic to this region, plants that lived happily in olive groves; of the insects, the fauna that were attracted to them, fed off them. ‘Honeybees, for example, have a vital role to play in the pollination of myriad wild flowers growing at the feet of the olive trees. And what is lovelier than an olive grove bursting with poppies, daisies, dandelions, sea daffodils, tamarisk, wild almonds, alliums …?’
Unfortunately, every sentence was interrupted by the man at my side.
‘I know about this flower. No, I don’t think we should be planting that!’
Or ‘that one encourages snails and they’re a nuisance
. I don’t agree with you!’
Eventually, the quality of the projection being what it was, along with the bombardment of unwanted opinions, Vincent shut down the equipment and suggested that it was time to set off. Having travelled by train, our botanist lacked transport. Nadine was staying on to clear up and the men were all going on somewhere afterwards. So was I – it was St Patrick’s Day and I had accepted an invitation to a party – but I valued the opportunity to talk to this man quietly alone, so I offered him a lift.
We set off into the hills towards St Jeannet and then, before entering the village, turned right, climbing a corkscrew road cut into the mountain’s ridged ascent. I asked Vincent how he had come to this work. He was originally from the Seine-et-Marne département east of Paris. His father had worked as a manager-labourer on a large conventional wheat farm, intensive farming, heavy chemical use. He had died young from a rather rare cancer. Vincent had gained his master’s in agricultural engineering in Paris but had quickly been drawn towards the alternatives. ‘I began to look at the figures, the statistics and ask questions. In the United States, more than eleven hundred kilos of chemicals per person are used each year and nearly ten per cent of these are recognised, identified carcinogens. Toxic chemicals in the States alone are causing the deaths from chronic diseases of over three-quarters of a million citizens each year, perhaps more. The region in France where I grew up is one of the heaviest users of pesticides, crop chemicals. I looked at all this and decided that there had to be another way to live. I suppose I am also driven by a memory of my father, ailing, wasting away.’
Towering above us was the mighty Baou of St Jeannet, a wrinkled eminence, an impressive bluff, that roared out of the mountain range. I was trying to concentrate on the road, listen to what Vincent was telling me – I was discovering that the argumentative farmer who had sat beside me at the lunch table, Henri, had been instrumental in Vincent being offered his present job! – and take in the awesome scenery. For no reason in particular, I had never been here before. It was astounding: dramatic fissures split the rock face.
‘There are deep caves everywhere here. The inhabitants used to hide in them to protect themselves from their enemies.’
‘Do you know this village then?’ I asked my companion.
He smiled. ‘Yes, it is born of a very ancient settlement, prehistoric. They claim that, even today, there are women living here in St Jeannet who practise witchcraft and they cure ailments with herbs and secret spells.’
I laughed.
‘Most of us who respect and use herbs might be so categorised. Warlocks and witches, we all.’
‘Do you know anything about a chrysanthemum that is a natural insecticide?’
According to Vincent, the plant was pyrethrum, indeed of the chrysanthemum family. The dried heads of the flowers made a natural insecticide, an insect repellant, but it was not recommended and, as far as he was aware, not available in France.
‘Why?’
‘It is indiscriminate, kills other insect life. Pyrèthre is its French name.’
This news was a blow. We drove silently while I took on board the fact that another avenue had met a dead end. Then Vincent returned our conversation to St Jeannet.
‘Once upon a time, all this area was rich agricultural land and the locals took their farming very seriously. Produce was a matter of great pride, until tourism took hold of the coast. But it has a fascinating history. Not far from here, back down the way we climbed, forking left along another cliff road also carved out of the Baou, is a fabulous fairytale castle. If you have time after we have finished, you might want to take a look.’
Because so much of this part of France, the Riviera, the Alpes-Maritimes coastal spread, had been blotted out by overconstruction, I was inclined sometimes to forget its distant past. Little of anything that dated further back than the mid-1800s remained.
‘And the village has its own water source. It is not connected to the regional water board but fed from springs high within the stark crags of the Baou. It gives the residents a rare independence and there is a quality about the people here that strikes me as unique. I feel they have retained attachments to a way of life that has been sold out elsewhere in these environs.’
We were passing a wooden gate, semi-hidden by tall laurel bushes. This was our destination. I drove on another two hundred metres and found a leafy spot to pull over.
‘This couple have eight hundred trees both young and old growing on a soil that is clay and limestone-based. You won’t be disappointed,’ winked Vincent. Together, we strolled back along the high-altitude lane. I wondered who ever passed this way. A drovers’ track originally, indubitably, herding up the Baou to wind-blasted summits.
Perched high on this dramatic mountain, full face to the distant sea, hidden by neatly laid rows of mature cypress, it was impossible to guess the rural beauty of the property we were about to visit. The house itself seemed modest enough but the grounds were remarkable. Tranquillity washed over me the moment we passed the gate. Vincent and I were the last to arrive. The other men were ahead, walking in a gaggle, moving slowly. Henri was still talking, offering his thoughts to a winding, pebbled lane that led to the house. I shot a glance to my right up the looming precipice. No construction beyond this level, nothing but a harsh climb to scree, boulders, resilient garrigue plants, a few holm oaks and pine trees, topped by a blue sky scattered with puffball clouds. Ideal for goats but little else. This was a long way from the capital of the Côte d’Azur, Nice, nestling somewhere at our toes not twenty minutes by car. And it did not surprise me to have learned from Vincent that the folk inhabiting this rock were of an infrangible breed.
A gentle curve in the path brought us to the first of the ancient olive trees. At its side, an installation had been constructed out of logs. Head lifted to the heavens, a wooden man was playing a wind instrument while climbing a defunct, wooden electricity pylon. There was something enormously joyful about this animated sculpture.
And then my first sighting of the view: a south-west aspect spread out, a great basin of swooping fields. It was as though someone had unfurled rolls of richly coloured silks that bumped, wrunkled and spilled into the sea. To the left, beyond an extensive vegetable garden where two young women were hoeing rows of lettuces, giggling uncontrollably, lay irregular, sloping patches of vineyards. Vincent had caught up with the men. I hung back – this, the environment, the afternoon, was too exquisite to hurry – descending at my own pace along stone paths that wound through olive groves, both old and young.
It was a paradise, and it brought my heart back home. ‘This is returning,’ I muttered to myself. Here was peace, a wholesomeness that I feared had been lost to me at Appassionata and I worried might never be retrieved.
Rounding another gentle gradation, I came upon a second installation. This one, on a patch of sharp green grass, nailed together out of rusted tins, was a capped fellow wheeling a bicycle, one tin leg bent as though he were about to hop on his transport and be on his way. For no particular reason, he seemed to personify a postman. The artwork was ingenious, a creative celebration of discarded segments of tin and iron.
Lying at the feet of or leaning up against the solid trunks of olives were the triangular wooden ladders that are so representative of Mediterranean orchards. We have one, which I care for proudly though the men tease me about it. I don’t care that it is less practical, heavier to lug about (it’s true that I am not the one to lift it), and not as weatherproof as its newer metallic alternatives. It represented a picture of rural harmony that I wished to preserve, albeit it in image only.
Nadine had arrived. She was waving, catching me up.
‘Un paradis ici, n’est-ce pas?’
I nodded. ‘Their situation is high – do you know what altitude?’
She shook her head.
‘I doubt that they are troubled by the olive fly.’
‘Oh, si, si, they are. One needs to be above six hundred metres to escape it.’
‘Have you seen the others, visited the groves where Vincent has planted flowers?’
I shook my head. ‘I haven’t got there yet.’
‘Let’s go.’
We picked up pace, also aware that time was limited because the last train to Avignon was at six fifteen, which struck me as incredible but also reminded me that in certain details this southern part of France resolutely maintained its pre-twenty-first-century rhythms. Only tourism requires more traffic. The locals by habit did not travel at night because they were up before dawn, worked their lands throughout the hours of light and went to bed early. Only when descending to markets and fairs did they sometimes travel after night had fallen.
‘Over there is where we have installed Psyttalia,’ Nadine was pointing vaguely to the right.
‘Psyttalia lounsburyi, the fly from Africa?’
‘We assisted INRA, the research centre at Sophia, in establishing him on five farms in this eastern region of the lower Alpes-Maritimes last September. We found the farms for the scientists and we regulate the situation every few weeks.’
‘May I take a look?’
She smiled, mildly puzzled by my excitement. ‘But there’s nothing to see. Even the boxes they arrived in have been taken down.’
‘Ah, so it is true, then, that the experiment has flopped?’
‘No. Where did you hear that?’
I recounted our outing of weeks earlier. Nadine listened silently and dropped her head, pawing the ground softly with her right boot. ‘Is that what they are saying?’
I was wary then, not wishing to become an instrument of perfidy between two bodies both funded by the government. I could see, though, that she was upset.
‘When we return back towards the house, we’ll make a little detour and I will show you the trees, the branches from which the flies were hung.’
‘And where are they now?’
‘Underground, we hope. We will only know later, towards summer, when the olive fly appears from its winter hibernation, whether Psyttalia has survived the harsher conditions here. It has been a wet winter, unusually so, and that might have been taxing for him, given that he has been reared in protected circumstances and his predecessors were African.’
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