Planting Trees

This past week I read a neat little story that was only 4,000 words long.  It was called, "The Man Who Planted Trees."  It was written by a French writer named Jean Giono and was published back in 1953.  I highly recommend reading it.  You can read the pdf version BY CLICKING HERE.

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It is about a man in 1913 who is walking through the Alps and walks into an area that is dry, desolate and uninhabited.  There is no water.  The hiker finally finds a well, but it is dry.  He stumbles across a shepherd who saves him by taking him to a spring.  The hiker stays with the shepherd for a while and observes him collecting acorns, sorting them meticulously.

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He curiously follows him and discovers that the widowed shepherd has taken it upon himself to restore the desolate valley by reforesting it - one tree at a time, even though the land does not belong to him.  He travels for miles, using his walking stick to press holes into the earth, dropping an acorn in the hole and then repeating time after time after time.  The hiker is impressed by the man's resolve and lofty goal.

The hiker leaves, fights in the first World War and returns seven years later to find thousands and thousands of saplings.  The valley is well on it's way to being restored.  Once dried streams are beginning to flow and the shepherd has gotten rid of his sheep and is now keeping bees to help pollinate the land.

The old man planted trees for 40 years!  Over the course of time this once barren landscape had become lush, vibrant, and alive.  People saw the beauty of the land and over 10,000 people moved in to populate the beautiful valley that the old man has singlehandedly transformed.

I had just read that story, when a gentleman came by the house the other day and began telling me about all the different beautiful birds he's been seeing at his house - birds like scarlet tanagers, Baltimore Orioles, and indigo buntings.  I told him I never see those birds and asked him how he gets those colorful birds to go to his house?

His answer?  He said, "I'll bring you the secret next week."  So this afternoon the gentleman drove up to the house and got out of his pickup truck with a Tupperware container and handed it to me.  It looked like it was filled with blackberries, but they weren't blackberries - they were mulberries.  He told me that those birds return to his house every year and eat the fruit from his mulberry trees.  He told me to go back in the woods behind the house and sprinkle the mulberries around.  If I'm patient, he said, I'll have mulberry trees bearing fruit in about 5 years attracting birds and making enough for us to eat as well.  I can remember that my grandmother and grandfather had a mulberry tree in the back of their house and have good memories of eating the fruit and staining my hands and mouth with the purple juice when I picked and ate them.

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Will my mulberry trees transform the land the way the old shepherd did in the book I described earlier?  Perhaps not.  But in a little way, maybe I can be "the man who planted trees," and those trees will grow and bear fruit and bring a little more happiness to us (and some pretty songbirds as well).