2021, dark green colour pencil Berol on paper, 80 x 125 cm.
About forty years ago I went on a long journey, on foot, through the uplands, utterly unknown to tourists, of the ancient region where the Alps extend into Provence.The area is bounded in the south-east and the south by the middle reaches of the river Durance, between Sisteron and Mirabeau; in the north by the upper course of the Drôme, from its source down as far as Die; and in the west by the plains of the Comtat Venaissin and the foothills of Mont Ventoux. It includes all the northern part of the department of the Basses-Alpes, the south of the Drôme, and a small enclave of the Vaucluse.1
It was there that the shepherd Elzéard Bouffier, a solitary man of few words, planted the first 10,000 oaks between 1907 and 1910, and continued planting until he was admitted to the Banon rest home, where he passed away peacefully in 1947.
Elzéard Bouffier managed to create an entire forest of oak and beech trees all on his own, that the French authorities declared to be self-seeded.
1 Jean Giono, The Man who Planted Trees, trnsl. by Barbara Bray, Harvill Secker, 1996
