The Garum - La Balmo - Land Parcel 998

            “Lé que té la Balmo, té la Bordo ... “ (he who owns la Balmo, owns the property)

            A curious appreciation if one considers well the slope of this meadow, la Balmo, from where one amply sees the facing hills : giant oak-trees, ash-trees,  nut-trees grow there liberally at the heart of thick and supple grass for we are on the north side. The path of “Las Taillados”, like a dried-out torrent or an Inca stairway whose steps would be of large flat bluish stones, goes along this meadow whose apple-trees among the fern produce hard fruit which have never known any fertilizer. The century-old oak-trees are enlaced by ivy which would have to be scissored with a axe. A colony of hazel-bushes has launched an attack on a wild cherry-tree :”that’s life !”, comments in a melancholy mood
Mr l’Escoussière adding that “the trees fight each other for the sake of light”. He designates on the hill, down there, in an angle of wasteland, the entrance to a phosphate mine,  quite abundantly exploited a few decades ago, then turning to the leafy proliferation which surrounds us, explains this super-abundance of plant-life precisely by the fact that this earth abounds with these very phosphates and therefore ...

            Shall I transform the “Balmo” into a walnut plantation Périgord style in case food resources came to lack one day ? The walnut,  without entering the category of table luxury, would supply at the same time the roast, the oil and the support : the Eurus uprooted sometimes a walnut-tree of another age out of which one made a handsome and solid table which the Gauls, come from the border of the ocean, recognized by instinct and before which they were not afraid of installing themselves, disdaining these tables with ivory legs representing leopards with open mouths into which the “garum”*- gorged guests slipped their big toe in order to laugh the better. Or else shall I plant pine-trees, wooden floor, pulp, millions per hectare according to the shrewd advice of Mr l’Escoussière ? or indeed shall I content myself with hazelnut bushes (the walnut of the poor) as this parisian Editor had envisaged to do after a serious market-study ordered from experts brilliantly qualified in Top Schools in which, it appears, one learns to sell one’s father, one’s mother, one’s children and the offspring of the offspring of these latter ? Who will live, will see...

*Garum is an intensely flavoured sauce, based on fish brine, the principal condiment used in Rome since the etruscan period.