While waiting for the imminent arrival of spring, here are 3 reading tips around gardening, which stand out for their originality or their unique or exceptional character. For once, we invite you to discover these works.
Le jardin de Rose, a comic strip on allotment gardens
“Le jardin de Rose” is entirely produced by Hervé Duphot, graphic designer, who signs the scenario and the illustration. He achieves a double feat: to create a comic book that deals with gardening, which is not common, and to offer very nicely illustrated boards with a precise and realistic line in expressive colors.
The allotment gardens are at the heart of the story since Françoise, in her fifties looking for a job, lives in a large complex in the Parisian suburbs and will be led to take care, reluctantly at first, of the allotment garden that her neighbor Rose has just obtained after years of waiting but that she cannot maintain because of an accident caused precisely by Françoise. Thus, unexpectedly, she will join a small community united by a passion for gardening and engage in a real process of relearning life…
(Editions Delcourt – March 4, 2020 – €17.50)
Notebook of a motionless traveler in a small garden
Here is another lovely book about a small country garden, simple and lush, this time in Burgundy. Fred Bernard, author and draftsman, offers in this “Notebook of a motionless traveler in a small garden”, a watercolor, personal and sensitive diary, relating the teeming life and the interactions of an entire miniature ecosystem, during an entire year, in the months and seasons.
Children’s author and cartoonist, Fred Bernard has maintained a passion for observing wildlife and plants. Others would have taken photos, he chose to make watercolors as if taken on the spot, annotated with details, documented, sometimes with a touch of humor, and enriched by extracts from literary texts and views of emblematic places of Burgundy. This pretty notebook by an artist gardener who is simultaneously an entomologist, naturalist, zoologist and observer will appeal to all nature-loving gardeners…
(Editions Albin-Michel – April 8, 2020 – €25)
The 4 Seasons: special issue 40 years
The first issue of the magazine Les 4 Saisons – Organic garden, permaculture and alternatives, was born in 1980 on the initiative of Terre Vivante created the previous year: this year, the 1st organic gardening magazine in France, a bimonthly magazine in 30,000 subscribers, and available on newsstands, is therefore celebrating its 40th anniversary.
This is an opportunity to come back to how the way of approaching the key concepts of organic gardening has evolved over these 40 years: plant associations, green manures, compost, plant manure, moon, mulching, work of the soil, auxiliaries, permaculture, vegetable biodiversity… And then, Claude Aubert, founder of Living Earth and the magazine, one of the pioneers of organic in France, analyzes in an interview how he sees the future of organic in 2020.
For this anniversary issue, a carte blanche to readers offers a poetic anthology full of emotions of letters from gardeners who testify to their link to the garden, to nature and to the magazine…
But the anniversary celebrated in this issue is a “plus” which does not prevent you from finding the usual headings there as well as a special file devoted to the soil to be understood differently because this living environment, matrix of agriculture and real ” microbiota”, is in danger.
(Editions Terre Vivante – on newsstands – €6.60)
Written by Nathalie on 03/12/2020