Style And Psychology

Gardening Style

I think I’ve commented before on contrasting gardening styles in England and France, the French preference for geometric patterns and discipline and the English preference for a ùore natural arrangement. One neighbour called my back garden a jungle and another a “ savante désordre”. The difference is just in stylistic appreciation.

The same is true in the allotments. Those French who are taking them seriously have much more orderly arrangements than mine but also much more barren ground. The peasant in me says “but you could grow a a lot more in all that space” despite the fact that we all grow a lot more than we need individually. Nature abhors a vacuum. The French-owned allotments have plants mostly arranged in lines and wide apart while I tend to plant in clumps and, if a useful plant, aflower or vegetable, sprouts somewhere I haven’t planted it, I leave it to grow there. Poppies have sprouted in various places from the seeds I gathered and scattered last year, as also have a couple of Californian poppies. In amongst the rows of potatoes I planted I have sunflowers, borage and lettuces growing from seeds self-sown from last year. Does it matter, does it offend? I don’t know but I can foresee some exchange of views ahead. Rather smugly I think that I will have a greater variety of plants in my allotment than anyone else. But does that matter? It’s simply a question of point of view and aesthetic appreciation. Whatever our points of view we’ll all get some satisfaction from our efforts and more vegetables than we need. I give my excess to friends and to the Bar du Pont for whoever wants it. I grow it simply because I like to.

Water

“Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink…..”. Well we do have drinking water but also a great deal more, which is unusual in these parts at this time of the year. The weather has been almost tropical, like English April weather on steroids: downpours and hot sunny intervals, frequent storms. It was estimated a few months ago that France needed two months of rain to reach normal levels of precipitation and, though we haven’t had the floods that Italy has I think we are well on the way to achieving that. Last summer we had restrictions on water use and the supply to the wash-house opposite me, which I use to water the plants in front of the house, was cut off. It still hasn’t been restored but I’m hoping that we will soon have enough for that to happen.

Provençal Psychology.

An important part of living here is understanding Provençal psychology. There seems to be a directive that you do not offend anyone if you can help it. So if you ask something of anyone, some kind of service, they do not want to say no; in effect to offend. It could be a routine service, a local plumber, an electrician or whatever but, if they don’t want the job, they will not say no they will simply not turn up when they say they will. So it is important to understand that non-appearance is equivalent to a “no”. In effect you are invited to look elsewhere for a solution to your problem, which obviously you can do. But…...you have to understand that that is the situation, yourself; nobody is going to tell you that that is the reality.

This occurred to me on one one occasion when one regular boules player in the village pissed off all the others and so the others all sought to play elsewhere. My response was to tell the others to tell this player to play elsewhere. But…….this was apparently not possible (I didn’t understand why at the time). Now I know that this would have created offence and that was why it was not possible. The problem resolved itself only when the offending player no longer came to play, because there were no other players to play with. So for a while no boules was played in the village. The message was clear but only implied, not stated. Eventually, when the offending player had understood the message or got frustrated, boules in the village resumed. All things come to those who wait?