By richard harvey
My very English mum had a lifelong vocation for nurturing difficult things. She was dedicated to the upbringing of my brothers and I, but I always knew that an especially significant part of her heart was dedicated to plants.
Starting with the indoor cultivation of my gran's African violets, and no matter where my family wandered in their itinerant search for work, she made the most of every patch of dirt under her control. Pragmatically grown vegetables for feeding the family were always fringed with flowers — their true purpose was to feed my mum's spirit, just vegetables feed the body. She knew nothing about art, but she loved the undeniable beauty of nature.
Later in her life, the vegetables went away as she and my dad moved into increasingly small habitations. The garden prevailed and soon followed her indoors — always including African violets — but now with a special love of bonsai. My mum was a simple Yorkshire lass, and had never been exposed to Japanese culture. There were some lovely Japanese prints on our walls that she had inherited from a relative, but the only reason I can attribute to her love was that Bonsai brought a garden indoors for someone who no longer could cultivate one outside.
I think of these diminutive, aged trees that she doted upon, gnarly and so wonderfully illustrative of “small is beautiful". Some of her bonsai were more than thirty years old when she last saw them arching and stretching from their small pots in her living room; they were her indoor forest. Sitting in her comfy chair and getting outraged at the ridiculous “bodice-ripper" book she'd willingly checked out from the library, she forest-bathed in her bonsai environs.
When I walk the hills of one of my favourite vineyard areas, Beaujolais, I am overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings. Many of Mum, and many not.
My best hands-on winemaking experiences have been at Château de Beauregard, an estate in the Mâcon / Beaujolais area of France that has in its possession some lovely and very old Gamay vines. One of my first duties at the winery was to take a group of charming, oh-so beautifully intense and professional Japanese sommeliers out for a vineyard visit. To this day, I can't walk these vineyards full of runty, exquisite Gamay vines without remembering both my mother and her tiny trees, as well as the fierce appreciation of the Japanese sommeliers. They knew that these tiny plants had struggled to exist for 50, 80 and some for 100 years on very unforgiving soil. We walked the vineyards together, among vines that were barely as tall as a bottle of wine, eighty or more years old, shaped by both nature and the human hand. I think we found a common ground in our appreciation of these plants and their interaction with humans, as well as being stunned and in love with the fruit of this stubborn and beautiful plant.
What does it take for a vineyard to reach 80-plus years of age?? Plant the vines and then work really, really hard for 8 decades to make sure the vines survive...
It is with mixed emotions that I now stride through the vineyards of Beaujolais. While many in the Beaujolais (like my alma mater, Château de Beauregard) embrace an organic approach, restoring vineyard soils and promoting biodiversity, I experience a little “mal au coeur" when I see some of these ancient bonsai vines growing in soils denuded of life due to the use of herbicides and pesticides. There is no excuse for treating the Earth this way — all it does is eventually poison us. We know (but seem to selectively forget) this truth, one that has surrounded us for many, many years.
For so many reasons, these vineyards should burgeon with soil life, invisible and visible. The birds and other wildlife know this — they gravitate towards green life and shun lunar-like surface sterility. Now who are the “bird-brained" ones? There’s no life in the chemically-blasted vineyards where nature has been banished.
I think my mum would say to such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, “Good luck on Mars… there's no life there.” Mum never read Voltaire, but she'd also likely channel him and tell these assholes (and I paraphrase Voltaire): Cultivate THIS garden, because it's the only one that counts!
