Jean Giono's The Man who Planted Trees is an unusual story, contemporary in its message, and one which reads as true but is - sad to say - 'only' a work of fiction. Originally published in Vogue under the title The Man who planted Hope and grew Happiness, it describes a journey on foot taken by the narrator in 1913 through a remote area of France. He meets few people in this largely inhospitable region of ruined villages, dry springs, and almost barren upland until he encounters a solitary shepherd who shares his simple meal with the traveller and gives him shelter overnight.
The visitor then discovers that while leading his flock to pasture, the shepherd plants acorns - a metal rod thrust into the ground at intervals makes the planting holes, the acorns are dropped in, the soil put back. In three years he has done this 100,000 times, and though his success rate is 10%, that is still a remarkable 10,000 oak trees growing where none were before.
The man returns after the 1914-18 war and finds the shepherd still there and his planting rate undiminished. The area is now home to beech and birch, brooks which had been dry are flowing again and there are "...willows, rushes, meadows, gardens, flowers, and a certain purpose in being alive."
The tale moves on to 1935, the forest burgeoning, the shepherd still in rude health, the countryside now supporting small communities - life has returned.
The story embodies its author's confidence in the future. Giono favoured the feminine form of the word hope, espérance, meaning "the permanent state or condition of living one's life in hopeful tranquility". What the shepherd does is simple and sustained, the positive difference he makes is unquantifiably huge. I commend this beautiful little book.
I have just read this, after spotting it in Waterstone's (and then using the library!) and wondered if anybody else had read it... and see that you have! isn't it wonderful? I'll be blogging about it soon.
Posted by: Simon T | 26 May 2010 at 12:35 PM