`Gardening at an altitude of 4,600 feet is a deadly serious business. Only blow-ins think you might do it for fun. For the natives, it is part of work, part of life, part of the way it has always been'
Gardening at altitude in the Catalan Pyrenees is dizzying in its intensity. Just below the conifer line where we are, at some 4,600 feet, the growing season is relatively short. The locals, true peasants to a man and woman, descendants of generations who lived entirely from the produce of their land and bought almost nothing from outside other than oil and wine, put in their terraced gardens in a burst of activity that starts after the last snows in April and dies with the first frosts in October.
These days the motocultor is the weapon of choice with which to churn the ground out of its winter torpor and ingratiate loads of cowdung or sheep-dung into the crumbly, schistous soil so that it will retain at least some of the moisture that might fall on it in a good year, like this one. It's an all or nothing approach, rather like the way country-people in Ireland go about their vegetable gardens, with purpose, speed and deadly intent, like they were obeying an inner clock rigged to a bomb that might go off if they don't get it done in time.
The soil here is very porous and limy. Kettles and pots fur up with scale in no time and getting up a lather from soap is akin to getting into a froth of indignation over Charles Haughey - hardly worth the bother. It is also truly stony and truly grey, greyer and stonier than anything I ever saw in Monaghan.
The gardens are terraces behind stone walls built high and strong to take advantage of any area that might be rendered flat, or even just slightly sloping, in a landscape where everything is at a steep angle. Every suitable pocket was used and owned with the tenacity that comes from knowing that this is where your next and possibly only bite is coming from.
The hazards in the way of getting a bite are manifold. As well as all the usual European pests and nuisances that keep Gerry Daly's radio callers happily moaning of a Saturday morning, there are bugs here as big as bunnies with bites like jackasses, rapacious ant colonies under every stone, marauding sheep, stray cattle, frolicsome colts, weird weeds and, quite frequently, bloodcurdling thunderstorms that seem determined to get a few geological aeons over in one night and wash the whole Pyrenees to the delta of the Ebro. And then there is the heat, the broiling heat which is glorious to behold from indoors, but something else when you are outside in it. There is this heat, that on most days, leaves gardener and plants panting and wilting in exhaustion by the early afternoon.
Yet well-worked earth here can be very productive. Lettuces are at an edible size within five weeks of planting. Beans rush out of the ground with bustling determination. Potatoes planted in April are ready for harvesting in June. Early sown garlic is already bursting its britches.
Not that anything in my garden is anywhere like as advanced. I was late starting, for one excuse, didn't apply enough dung for another, and, above all, I lack the do or die attitude of the true peasant, who for all he might drive up to see his sheep on their summer pastures in a brand new 4 x 4 Nissan Pajero, and watch Sky Sports on his parabolica at night, still puts in a garden like his life depended on it.
Of course it is the women who tend the garden once it is in. The men do all their heaving and grunting at the outset but then leave the women to water, weed and nurture the staples of cabbages, onions, spuds, leaf beet, tomatoes, marrows, aubergines, peppers, carrots, parsnips, beans and peas. Not a square inch is wasted and the gardens are Babylonian wonders of verdant luxuriance.
But then the whole landscape is a form of garden. The higher fields at the native forest's edge are now being overrun with juniper and birch, because they are no longer grazed or cultivated like they used to be, making them feeding places for the wild pigs which snout through them for roots in winter. The lower meadows, which are farmed organically, par faute de mieux, and get annual dressings of farmyard manure, are resplendent now with columbine, poppies, cranesbills, yarrow, oxeye daisy, alfalfa, vetches, umbellifers of all sorts, the kind of wildflowers that are rarely seen on farmland in Ireland these days, where ryegrass monoculture rules OK.
The tourists who are beginning to trickle up from the valleys step from their cars for a moment to look out on a landscape in which everything is orderly and seemly. For the people here are fiercely industrious, taking pride in working de sol a sol, from dawn to dusk, despite the Common Agricultural Policy, which would really just like them to recognise that their day is done and to desist from their insistence that there is still human life in these hills.
Not that they stand grinning with pride at their achievements. Nobody here smiles for no reason. Smiling is what you do in the lowlands, or in the movies, or the magazines. Up here, where for a thousand years people hewed a living out of rocks, what is there to smile about?
No, gardening here is deadly serious. Only blow-ins, guiris, as we are called, think you might do it for fun. For the natives, it is part of work, part of life, part of the way it has always been. I'll have to develop a more sombre attitude, and a surly-looking bake to go with it. The hat, made in Japan, bought in the Powerscourt emporium, may have to go too. The handkerchief knotted at the four corners seems to be de rigueur here.
Jane Powers is on leave and her column will resume next week