The Man Who Planted Trees (2 page)

When he reached the place he was aiming for, he began making holes in the ground with his rod, putting an acorn in each and then covering it up again. He was planting oak trees. I asked him if the land was his. He said it wasn't. Did he know who the owner was? No, he didn't. He thought it must be common land, or perhaps it belonged to people who weren't interested in it. He wasn't interested in who they were. And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns.

After the midday meal he started sorting out more acorns to sow. I must have been very pressing with my questions, because he answered them. He'd been planting trees in this wilderness for three years. He'd planted a hundred thousand of them. Out of those, twenty thousand had come up. Of the twenty thousand he expected to lose half, because of rodents or the unpredictable ways of Providence. That still meant ten thousand oaks would grow where before there had been nothing.

It was at this point that I wondered how old he was. He was obviously over fifty. Fifty-five, he said. His name was Elzéard Bouffier. He had once owned a farm on the plains. It was there he had lived his life.

But he had lost first his only son, then his wife. After that he came here to be alone, enjoying an unhurried existence with his sheep and his dog. But it struck him that this part of the country was dying for lack of trees, and having nothing much else to do he decided to put things right.

As I myself, despite my youth, was leading a solitary life at the time, I was able to sympathise with others like me and deal tactfully with their sensibilities. But I made one mistake with him. Because I was young I naturally thought of the future in terms of myself, and assumed everyone sought the same happiness. So I remarked how magnificent his ten thousand oak trees would be in thirty years' time. He answered quite simply that, if God spared him, he'd have planted so many other trees in those thirty years, the ten thousand would be just a drop in the ocean.

He was already studying the reproduction of beeches, and close to the house was a nursery of saplings grown from beechnuts. He'd put up a fence to protect them from the sheep, and they were already fine specimens. He was also thinking of birches for low-lying spots, where according to him there was a certain amount of humidity a few metres below the surface.

We parted the following morning.

The year after that the 1914 war broke out, and I was in the army for five years. As an infantryman I hadn't much time to think about trees. And to tell the truth, the episode hadn't affected me all that much: I thought of the oaks as a hobby, like stamp collecting. So I forgot about them.

When the 1914 war was over I found myself with a small amount of demob money and a great desire to breathe some fresh air. So with no other purpose but that I set out again for the same deserted landscapes as before.

The country itself hadn't changed. But when I got beyond the dead village I could see in the distance a kind of grey mist covering the hills like a carpet. Since the previous evening I'd started thinking about the tree-planting shepherd again. “Ten thousand oaks take up a lot of room,” I reflected.

I'd seen so many people die in the last five years I could easily imagine that Elzéard Bouffier must be dead too. The more so as, when you're twenty, men of fifty seem like old codgers with one foot in the grave. But he wasn't dead. On the contrary, he was still very spry. He had adopted a different calling. There were only four ewes left, but now he had about a hundred beehives. He'd got rid of the sheep because they were a threat to his trees. For, as he told me, and as I could see for myself, he had taken no notice of the war and gone on imperturbably planting trees.

By this time the 1910 oaks were ten years old and taller than both him and me. They were an impressive sight. I was left literally speechless, and as he didn't speak either we spent the whole day walking silently through his forest. It was in three sections, and measured eleven kilometres across at its widest point. When you remembered that it had all emerged from the hands and spirit of this one man, without any technical aids, you saw that men could be as efficient as God in other things beside destruction.

He'd stuck to all his plans, as was evident from the beech trees that came up to my shoulder and stretched away as far as the eye could see. The oaks were thick and dense, and past the age of being at the mercy of rodents. As for Providence and its powers of destruction, it would have taken a hurricane now to undo the shepherd's creation. He showed me some beautiful birch plantations dating from five years back — 1915, when I was fighting at Verdun. He'd put them in all the low-lying places, where he had rightly suspected there was dampness just beneath the surface of the soil. They were as fresh and tender as youths, and full of the will to live.

There seemed to be a sort of chain reaction in all this creation, but Elzéard Bouffier didn't trouble about that: he just went stubbornly on with his task, simple and natural as ever. But going back down through the village I saw there was water flowing in streams that had been dry as long as anyone could remember. As chain reactions go, this was the most remarkable one I'd ever seen. The last time those brooks had flowed was in very ancient times.

Some of the dreary villages I mentioned at the beginning of this story were built on the sites of old Gallo-Roman villages, of which some traces still remained. Archaeologists had dug up fish hooks where, in the twentieth century, storage tanks were the only source of water.

Seeds were carried on the wind, too, so as the water reappeared, so did willows, reeds, meadows, gardens, flowers and some reason for living.

But the change came about so slowly, people got used to it and took it for granted. Hunters coming up into lonely places after hares and wild boar had noticed lots of young saplings, but they put it down to the whim of nature. That was why no one interfered with what the shepherd had done. If they'd suspected what he was up to they'd have tried to stop him. But no one did suspect it. How could anyone, whether in the villages or in government offices, have imagined such perseverance, such magnificent generosity?

From 1920 on, I never let a year go by without paying Elzéard Bouffier a visit. I never saw him weaken or doubt. And yet God knows God Himself gave him cause to! I never counted up the setbacks and disappointments he met with. But inevitably so great an achievement must have had to surmount some adversity, and such a passion couldn't have won through without some struggles against despair. He spent a year planting over ten thousand maples.

They all died. The following year he dropped maples and went back to beeches, which turned out to be even more of a success than the oaks.

One cannot properly appreciate this rare character unless one remembers that he accomplished what he did in complete solitude. So complete was his isolation that towards the end of his life he got out of the habit of speaking. Or did he no longer see any need for speech?

In 1933 he had a visit from a shocked forest warden who told him he mustn't light fires out of doors in case he endangered the “natural” forest.

This was the first time ever, replied the simple shepherd, that a forest had sprung up of its own accord. By this time he'd taken to going and planting beech trees twelve kilometres away from where he lived. To save himself having to go home every night — he was seventy-five by now — he decided he would build a stone hut among the young trees. He built it the following year.

In 1935 a government delegation came to inspect the “natural forest”. The visitors included a senior official from the Forestry Commission, a member of parliament and several technicians. There was much empty talk. It was decided that something must be done, but fortunately nothing “was” done. Except for one useful measure: the forest was placed under the protection of the State, and charcoal burning was forbidden there. For it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by the beauty of those young and healthy trees. Even the member of parliament was entranced.

One of the senior forest wardens in the delegation was a friend of mine. I explained the mystery to him, and one day during the following week we set out together to see Elzéard Bouffier. We found him hard at work twenty kilometres away from where the delegation had carried out their inspection. The senior warden wasn't my friend for nothing: he knew what was what, and didn't say anything. I handed over a few eggs that I'd brought as a present, and we divided our provisions into three. As we ate, and for some time after, we just gazed silently at the landscape. In the direction we'd come from the land was covered with trees between six and seven metres high. I recalled what it looked like in 1913: a wilderness.

Peaceful and regular work, a frugal way of life, the bracing air of the uplands, and above all his tranquillity of mind — all these had given the old man an almost awesome good health. He was an athlete of God. I wondered how many more hectares he was going to cover with trees. Before we left, my friend briefly and simply suggested that certain other trees might be very suitable for this terrain, though he didn't press the point. “After all, he's wiser than I am,” he said. Then, after my friend and I had walked on for about an hour, he added: “He's the wisest man in the world! He's discovered a perfect recipe for happiness!”

Because of my friend, not only the forest but also our hero's happiness was protected: three subordinates were appointed, and bullied to such good purpose that they remained unmoved by any bribes the woodcutters might tempt them with.

The tree-planter's work wasn't really threatened until the 1939 war. In those days cars were run on machines that turned wood into gas, and there was never enough wood. People started cutting down the oaks that had been planted in 1910, but the trees were so far from main roads that the business didn't pay and was abandoned. The shepherd didn't even know about it. He was thirty kilometres away, going peacefully on with his task, ignoring the 1939 war just as he'd ignored the war of 1914.

I saw Elzéard Bouffier for the last time in June 1945. He was then eighty-seven. I took the same route into the wilds as before, but now, although everything had been allowed to run down during the war, there was a bus service linking the valley of the Durance and the mountains. I assumed it was because I was driving through the country relatively fast that I didn't recognise scenery I'd seen for the first time on foot. Some of the settlements we went through also seemed quite new. It was only when I found out the names of the villages that I knew I really was back in a region that had once been ruined and desolate. The bus set me down in Vergons.