Plant a Local Tree

I went up to Sainte Maure de Touraine (Village de Vaux to be precise) on a wet day in mid-November to help plant out little tree seedlings. Antoine had collected seeds from local species and sowed them in seedling pots last year. Now they were ready to go into temporary positions in the ground. Christian had laid out three shallow furrows on an east facing grass slope on his property. The seedlings were laid out in crates by species -- Sessile Oak Quercus petraea (Fr. Chêne rouvre), Wild Service Tree Sorbus torminalis (Fr. Alisier torminal), Dogwood Cornus sanguinea (Fr. Cornouiller sanguin), Domestic Service Tree Sorbus domestica (Fr. Cormier), Wild Privet Ligustrum vulgare (Fr. Troène commun), Sweet Chestnut Castanea sativa (Fr. Châtaignier) and European Crab Apple Malus sylvestris (Fr. Pommier sauvage). Guillaume and I extracted them from their pots, Antoine and Christian planted them.

 

In a year's time they will be available for landowners who want to give them a good home and plant a hedge, or even just dot a few native local trees about. They will already be well adapted to the local conditions and should thrive. 

Once we were done we sat around drinking organic wine supplied by Guillaume. He's currently working with wine makers as a consultant. He also presented me with a bottle of apricot nectar, made by one of his clients. He was rather amused to learn about the Aussie classic Apricot Chicken, and that will certainly be what I use the nectar for. Especially as I've just defrosted and cleaned the freezer and discovered I have eight packs of two chicken legs. Powdered French Onion Soup by Maggi turns out to be unavailable, but fortunately Knorr make it and my local supermarket stocks that.

The Demolition of Dennery

The demolition of the Dennery factory on the edge of Preuilly is nearly at an end. It started in June and have caused quite a lot of nostalgia in town.

Many of the last cohort of workers are still alive, having worked in many cases their entire careers at Dennery, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The Dennery workshops, in November 2019.

The town was proud of this enterprise which was making high quality furniture that in its day was known worldwide.

In the 1960s the firm employed between 150 and 200 people (which in a town with a population of around a thousand, is significant). It finally closed for good in 2002, but in 1983 had won an award for exporters with fewer than 200 employees.

Former factory manager's house, November 2019.

The clients were corporations like L'Oréal, Mercedes-Benz, Balmain, Renault, who would come to Preuilly and Dennery for their headquarters interiors and furniture. 

The factory worked in luxury woods like mahogany, ebony, rosewood, lemonwood, and birdseye maple. The furniture produced here was going just about everywhere in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Former Dennery employees can remember the Saudi King visiting to personally choose elements of the pieces for his private apartment. 

The demolished workshops, November 2023.

 

Then there was the interior fittings for the Louvre Pyramid, the Bastille Opera and the National Library of France. One prestigious contract after another. But there were also periods when the order books were empty and the workers were put on chomage partiel, an arrangement where the State will cover 80% of employees wages via a specific type of unemployment benefit (widely used by many firms during Covid lockdowns).

And in 1998 the business was bought by a Paris based enterprise. Employees found out via the furniture trade press rather than were informed directly. It was a shock.

The former factory manager's house, November 2023, the only structure on the site which will not be demolished.

Former employees claim the new owners set unrealistic goals and were not overly scrupulous, so they set up a workers co-operative and took over the business. In the end though, the project failed through lack of support amongst the workers, and the real estate (buildings and land) is now owned by a medical supplies distributor.

Once the site is cleared TotalQuadran will start installing thousands of solar panels. Former Dennery employees are bitter that the Comcom (a level of local government above 'commune' and below 'département') could not create an 'atelier relais', a facility designed to take young people who want to train in a trade, but have been unable to gain a place at a specialist artisan college or an apprenticeship.

Our Ukrainians Visit a Farm

Recently I organised with a local farmer, Mme Marchoux, for some of 'our' Ukrainians to visit her family farm. She and her grand daughter Anna were there to welcome a dozen Ukrainian mums and kids and the goats and horses got more attention than they get most days. At the end of the visit we had the opportunity to buy some of the farm's cheese, as well as other local produce.

Anna was very excited to have visitors, especially as a couple of them go to the same school as she does. She loved showing everyone around and telling them about the farm. Earlier in the day she had run up to me in the market to give me a drawing she had done. She is a thoroughly engaging and charmingly sociable child. Her grandmother is justifiably proud of her, and I can tell that Anna will look back on her upbringing on the farm, with unlimited access to her doting grandmother and all the animals, and remember how lucky she is.

'Our' Ukrainians are all city slickers, from Kiev and Mykolaiv mostly, but they all love animals and really value getting out into the countryside.

 Anastacia, Milana and Valeria make friends with the Percherons.

Photo courtesy of Olena Kirpa.

Me with the albino riding hack.

Photo courtesy of Olena Kirpa.

Alicia, Maria, Anastacia, Milana and Valeria, with Vita, meet the dairy goats.

Photo courtesy of Olena Kirpa.

Anastacia patting 'her' goat, which she did her best to convince Olena to allow her to take home. The goat definitely liked the attention though, and rushed from one end of the pen to the other to make sure it got petted as we moved around the shed.

Alicia and Maria, with Vita, feeding the goats.

Alicia feeding a goat.

Two of the girls, Anastacia and Milana, got brave and climbed in with the goats, with some encouragement from Anna.

 

Liudmyla with a Percheron. 

These big gentle horses are bred on the farm and used for carriage driving and agricultural events.

Liudmyla, who is a pastry chef and spoke French before she arrived here as a refugee, was very interested in the goats and cheese production and asked lots of questions about how they are managed.

Maria and Vita with the goats.

Anna showing Vita, Valeria, Inna, Alicia and Liudmyla how to feed the goats with hay grown on the farm.

Maria meets a nanny goat.

Many thanks to Mme Marchoux, and Anna, from Limouzin freres, a prize winning goats cheese producer at Le Petit Pressigny for hosting this visit.

This outing cost us nothing, but if you want to support the activities of the Association d'Acceuil et d'Accompagnement des Réfugiés en Sud Touraine (AARST) please send me a message and I can give you the bank account to make donations to. We help refugees who arrive in the Sud Touraine with their paperwork, medical visits, housing, employment and schooling, as well as the occasional social outing. Alternatively, if you live locally you can support 'our' Ukrainians by buying their baked goods and handmade goods when you see them at fairs and markets. The funds they raise go towards buying drones, generators, medical items and other things desperately needed back in Ukraine.

Truffles Wild and Cultivated in the Touraine Val de Loire

Black Truffle Tuber melanosporum (Fr. Truffe noire) is native to the Loire Valley, but has long since disappeared from the wild. According to the experts and old timers the best place to find truffles was under isolated oak trees in the middle of wheat fields, but fifty years of modern farming practices and fungicides sprayed on wheat crops have destroyed the habitat for truffles. The truffles benefitted from the disturbance of the soil with the plough and the minor damage done to the tree roots, allowing the truffle mycelium to latch on, providing the conduit for a symbiotic exchange of nutrients. It may explain why isolated mature oak trees in the middle of fields continue to be a not uncommon sight in the Touraine. 

Oak trees dotted about the fields.

Nowadays, because of their extirpation in the wild, truffles are cultivated, in orchards planted with inoculated oak trees. Black Truffles fruit in the winter, and over winter there is a series of specialist markets in the otherwise undistinguished village of Marigny-Marmande.

Truffle orchard.

Local growers tell me that alternating wet and warm weather from May to July is crucial to ensuring a good truffle harvest over the winter, from November to February, so I assume the harvest this winter is expected to be poor because of the drought. The markets before Christmas double as general seasonal gourmet markets, with other producers there to sell their venison, snails, nuts and dried fruits, preserves, winter pork and poultry products and cheeses, speciality breads, honey and wines. The markets after Christmas are all about the truffles, with far fewer stalls, and tree whips inoculated with truffle spores available for those who want to try a few in their garden for fun. Serious truffle buyers come in January, when the quality of the truffles is at its best. About 20 – 35 tonnes of truffles are harvested these days in the Loire Valley, which the area a major player nowadays. Back in 1900 the harvest of wild truffles here was a thousand tonnes.

Black truffles at the specialist market in Marigny-Marmande.

Anyone with a truffle orchard is playing a long game. The trees will take at least ten years to produce a truffle, and some may never do so. Others will go on to produce truffles for thirty years or more. My friendly local truffle guru tells me that a good truffle orchard has a mixture of the local species of oak, and the evergreen species that is native to the south of France. The local oak is small, deciduous and adapted to the local poor dry chalky soils and will produce truffles earlier than the evergreen species, but is weakened by the truffles and has a shorter lifespan than the evergreens. He owns two lively truffle hounds, a Jack Russell called Pierre, and a wire haired dachshund called Odile. Truffle hounds can be any breed of dog, and are trained by getting them to play fetch with a truffle oil impregnated sparkling wine cork.

The cultivation and commercialisation of truffles came about in the late 19th century because so many vines were grubbed up due to phylloxera. Instead of vines, farmers planted oaks. They understood that the trees would quite likely have truffles attach themselves to the roots. But by the end of World War One there was no labour to work on the land, then the Depression and another World War, and the trees had reached the end of their productive life. So truffles became once again scarce and expensive. 

Truffle orchards began being planted again in the 1970s, often by bourgeois enthusiasts at their country homes, keen to revive a tradition. INRA, the French national agronomy research institute, developed a technique of inoculation of oak and hazel saplings that resulted in a quarter of the trees producing truffles within a decade. Today 90% of French truffles are cultivated and there are about 20 000 truffle farmers in France. Drought and wild boars are the biggest problems that they face. The reason pigs are such good truffle hunters is that the aroma of truffle is the same as boar pheromones, so the sows go crazy for them. In the wild it means the truffles can spread due to the boars ploughing.

Roman Amphitheatre, Arles

The Roman amphitheatre in Arles (Fr. les Arènes d'Arles) was built about 80-90 AD. It is a place constructed to take large crowds watching great spectacular events.

It is built on a hill. To build it, the perimeter wall from a hundred years earlier had to be demolished. 

The building is inspired by the Coliseum in Rome, which had only just been finished. There are numerous access and egress corridors, an oval central stage surrounded by grandstands and two levels of arcades formed by 60 arches and a gallery around the circumference on each floor. The amphitheatre in Arles is bigger than that of Nimes, which was constructed shortly afterwards and is now better preserved. The top floor of the amphitheatre in Arles has disappeared. The building could take 25 000 spectators.

At Arles, like everywhere in Western Europe, the amphitheatre is the most obvious sign of the Romanisation from the end of the 1st to the 3rd century.  

This 'temple' of games, where gladiators confronted one another, stayed in use up until the end of the Roman Empire. We know that in 539 Childebert, King of Paris, had games put on there to celebrate his visit to the south, and the amphitheatre was still in use when Arles was taken over by the Franks in 550.

At the end of the 6th century the amphitheatre was adapted to fit the new realities of life, in a period of increasing insecurity. The amphitheatre became a bastide (a type of urban fortress) and over time four defensive towers were added. Inside the walls there were more than two hundred dwellings and two chapels.

The nice restaurant we had lunch at before visiting the amphitheatre.

At the end of the 15th century only the poor lived in the amphitheatre. Francois I visited in 1516 and was dismayed to find such a historic structure in such a sorry state. The occupation by the poorest inhabitants of Arles continued until 1825 when the slum dwellings were cleared away and the residents forced to go elsewhere. In 1830 it took on its current function as a bull fighting arena. Vincent van Gogh painted the crowd at an event in the amphitheatre in 1888. The painting is now in the collection of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

A gladiator re-enactor with a class of kids.

Today the amphitheatre is the most visited historic monument in Arles. It is used for various styles of bull pestering and equestrian shows, as well as musical spectaculars and theatrical performances, including gladiator displays. 

Demarcation Line Exhibition

The original Demarcation Line sign from Azay sur Cher. The mayor pointed out to me that there is a spelling mistake in the French on the bottom line.

Recently Preuilly hosted a really interesting locally curated exhibition on the Ligne de la demarcation, the border between 'Free' France and Occupied France in the first couple of years of the Second World War. Our area, the Sud Touraine, was divided by this border and so experienced it up close and personally. 

A sign pointing to German headquarters.

 

The following text is my translation of the introduction to the exhibition catalogue.

September 3 1939 was when the so called 'Phoney War' started for the French armed forces, most of which was restricted to the fortifications on the Maginot Line. On May 10 1940 the Wehrmacht descended on the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and the north-east of France.

The courage of the invaded countries' armies was not enough to stop the larger and better equipped enemy. There were numerous dead, wounded and prisoners from this Blitzkrieg. One month after this action, on June 14 1940, the victorious soldiers of the Third Reich marched in Paris, which had been declared an open city.

In France, the armistice was signed on June 22 1940 at Rethondes (Oises) in the railway carriage that symbolised victory in 1918 for the French and defeat for the Germans. The Hexagon* found itself parcelled up into zones and Article 2 of the Armistice agreement brought into being on June 25 a Demarcation Line between an Occupied Zone and a Zone known as  'Free' or 'nono' ('non occupée). The Government of the 'Free' Zone was installed at Vichy (Allier) with Marshall Pétain at its head. He took the title of French Chief of State on July 11.

La Demarkationslinie or green line owed its name to the colour of the line on the joint map from the Armistice agreement. The Germans had wanted that because in 1918 the territories on their soil which were occupied by the Allies were delineated by a green line. The text referring to this interior border delineated 43 occupied counties in the north and west, 34 in the 'nono' Zone and 13 cut in two. Indre et Loire belongs to this last group. A village could be crossed by this artificial boundary, like Cussay, and a number of farms woke up with their buildings on one side of the line and their land on the other. The first line didn't satisfy the occupying authorities and they decided to modify it to suit their aims. This took place in the night of December 14-15 1940, and a new definitive line was imposed on everyone.

This separation line was simultaneously political, military and economic.

 Key dates in Preuilly sur Claise during World War II. 

• June 1940 Preuilly was bombed and several days later the Germans entered the town and occupied it.
• July 1940 Preuilly was transferred to the 'Free' Zone.
• November 1942 the Germans invaded the 'Free Zone and by March 1943 they occupied all of France.
• July 1944 Resistance fighters in the forest were betrayed and ambushed by 1000 German troops with tanks in an action known as the Battle of Pechoire.
• August 1944 the Resistance and the Germans held a meeting with a view to brokering an agreement to ensure peaceful passage of retreating German troops. Preuilly's mayor acted as personal guarantor that the Germans would not be attacked (and was prepared to pay with his life if the Germans were not given safe passage by the Resistance).
  
• September 1944 Allied aircraft attacked the Germans hiding in the forests around Preuilly. The next week 180 000 retreating German troops passed through Preuilly.
• October 1944 the mayor was confirmed in his position and a new Liberation council was put in place.
  

Ration cards.

Forged identification papers.

Further reading: The Etudes sur la Résistance en Indre et Loire (Studies on the Resistance in Indre et Loire) website http://eril37etcentrecom.wifeo.com.

Farmers Make Their Point

Overnight on the 21-22 November dozens of villages and towns in Indre et Loire had their town signs turned upside down. The culprits were local farmers, protesting that the market is skewed against them and that they are competing against unfair rules. The protest has been dubbed 'marche sur la tete', a French saying meaning 'topsy turvy' or 'arse about face' and used when you are angry about a situation that makes no sense.

The peaceful protest started a couple of weeks ago in the Tarn as the brainchild of the Young Farmers (Fr. Jeune agriculteurs) down there. Now it is nationwide. 

 

I photographed the Preuilly town sign on my way back from aquagym on Wednesday. Just in time, because a few minutes later Guillaume and his colleague from the municipal works department turned up with their spanners to return the sign to right way up.

The Indre et Loire farmers hatched their plans at the big Farm Expo in Tours on the weekend. The main focus of the protest is to highlight unfair imports. The farmers had the chance to talk to the Minister for Agriculture at the Expo and felt like he was deaf to their representations.

One of their complaints is that they are completely forbidden from using pesticides in Natura 2000 zones. They say that the easiest way to go pesticide free is to have pasture. But you need grazing animals if you have pasture, and the Government doesn't want any more cows. It's a Catch 22. The farmers don't want to be gardeners making the countryside pretty for tourists. Their job, as they see it, is to produce food. They do not feel they are being given the means to transition to a pesticide free, energy efficient and environmentally friendly and sustainable way of managing their land, but are being pressured to do so nonetheless. All they see is the increasing regulation imposed on them and the resulting difficulties with increasing paperwork and imports from producers that don't have to comply with the same strict rules.

The farmers also feel that the French law which supposedly requires supermarkets to pay a fair price for produce is not enacted regularly enough. There should be an automatic price revision when commodity prices change, but changes to energy, packaging and labour costs do not trigger a review. In addition, the reality is that only 20% of products are covered by this legislation, and most farmers find themselves locked into contracts that are only reviewed annually.

The protesters are hoping to raise awareness of their cause amongst the general public. Some specific examples I've seen highlighted in the news are endives from Spain being sold labelled as 'Saveurs de Ch'ti' (giving consumers the impression they come from the area around Lille); or vegetables such as cabbage, leeks and potatoes, produced in Belgium using chemicals banned in France, but still able to be imported and sold in France. French farmers are unhappy at being forced by the EU to put 4% of their land to fallow from next year, saying they will lose money with machinery left idle and it's like having to renounce 4% of their income, whilst still bearing the same expenses.

Whilst I have a lot of sympathy, especially on the various issues surrounding imported vegetables, some of the farmers arguments do not stack up, such as the idea that fallow land will cost them money, and that they can't farm without pesticides. It's a simple but clever protest though and I applaud them for getting the nation talking and for keeping it peaceful.

I would say the campaign has been quite successful. Social media is absolutely buzzing with people posting photos and asking why their town sign is upside down. Plenty of people out there are ready to respond, and there is a lot of support, at least in terms of people's comments.

Walking From La Guerche

On Thursday 9 November I joined Joel and Denise, Helene and Dominique to walk 10 kilometres from La Guerche, in the wind and rain. With sheltering from the rain breaks it took two and three quarter hours.

A surveyors' marker on the side of an agricultural track.

False Turkey Tail Stereum hirsutum (Fr. Stérée hirsute) on a fallen birch branch.

A rather rotund solitary sheep sheltering under a solitary pear tree in a field watches us go by.

This is some sort of Agaricus sp mushroom, and I think it might be Great Wood Mushroom A. langeai. Last year I found a single mushroom in this spot, this year it is a colony of tens of mushrooms.

Sheltering from a heavy rain shower at about the halfway mark.

Walking through the forest near Rond du Chene.

A sacred well known as the Fontaine de Prélong. It is a spring protected by a small building made of chunks of flint.

Offerings on the well.

This is a Tremella sp. I assume it is Golden Ear T. aurantia (Fr. Trémelle orangée), as it appears to be feeding off False Turkey Tail.

This is the ancient border between Poitou and Touraine. In the 14th century where I am standing, in Poitou, would have been English territory and across the valley in the distance the Touraine was French.

A big patch of Ivy had been brought down by the recent storms and was blocking the track.

New Guide to the ZNIEFF in the Sud Touraine

The long awaited (well, by me at any rate) guide to the Zones Naturelles d'intéret écologique, faunistique et floristique du Sud Touraine is finally out. It is great!

 The front cover of the guide.

The guide is the result of 5 years of work by a small team led by Francois Lefebvre, ably assisted by Jean-Claude Jacques. I contributed some photos and helped with the field work and biodiversity surveying. Over the life of the project Francois had 3 interns who got a glimpse of real working life as an ecologist as part of their university training. My friends Alain Chartier, Marc Fleury and Jean Pelle all contributed photos and provided lots of historical knowledge of the sites. Yohann Sionneau contributed his specialist knowledge of the River Claise and its tributaries. Olivier Lorain did the graphic design and printing. The book is dedicated to the memory of botanist extraordinaire Francois Botté, and there are a number of other ecologists, botanists, entomologists and naturalists involved who I never got to meet.

Open at the chapter for La Cabane.

The guide was produced because Francois Lefebvre recognised that we have something rather special in the Sud Touraine. Our chalky limestone means that water has carved out numerous valleys and natural cavities which have been subsequently modified by man. The climate is sub-Mediterranean, and we are on the northern limits of the distribution for many southern species. The proximity to the Brenne means that we also have inland wetland habitats and the species associated with them. In a relatively small area we have a remarkable diversity of species. Consequently there are today 28 sites identified and classified at national level as ZNIEFF, acknowledging their exceptional interest in terms of the flora and/or fauna present.

The back of the guide, which says: "The Sud Touraine, gâtine* country, with its great residual stands of forest, and its numerous valleys cut into the Turonian chalk still exhibits a number of preserved habitats. Wet heathland, chalk mounds, underground cavities, natural grasslands at the base of valleys...These are the places, often a bit hidden and difficult to access, that we want to introduce you to, across 28 sites classed as ZNIEFF, real reservoirs of local biodiversity."

 *Gatine is land that has low nutrient, heavy, poorly draining clay soil. This heath and poor natural grassland surrounded by forest was traditionally used to pasture goats and sheep, until the 19th century when it began to be cultivated.

Here is the official blurb, from Jean-Claude, and translated by me:

The Patrimoine Vivant en Claise Tourangelle (PVCT) association has spent 5 years updating or creating the 28 reports describing the most remarkable natural environments in southern Touraine and listing some of the emblematic animal and plant species they shelter.

These reports, illustrated with location maps and numerous color photos, have just been published: Les ZNIEFF du Sud Touraine - Zones Naturelles d'intérêt Écologique, Faunistique et Floristique. Les Cahiers de la Claise n°13 (see cover photo).

This 159-page publication is on sale for €14 at the Grand-Pressigny Tourist Office and at the "Le Petit Fabien" bookshop in Preuilly-sur-Claise.

It can also be ordered from PVCT (7 Grande Rue, 37350 Le Grand Pressigny) with a cheque for 20€ (14€ + 6€ postage).

If you are interested in the nature of the Sud Touraine I highly recommend you get a copy of this guide. And keep an eye out for announcements from me on FB that there will be an outing to one or more of the sites next year.

An outing for the general public on behalf of Botamyco37 in May 2023 to La Cabane, Bossay sur Claise, one of the sites featured in the guide.

In order to have a site declared as a ZNIEFF the owner needs to be sympathetic to the idea of protecting nature. The aim is to raise awareness and offer a limited level of protection to the site. For example, should the owner decide to sell and a new owner wished to develop the site they would be unlikely to get planning permission.