One of the many interesting things about living overseas is observing the gap between the image of the country held by one's compatriots and the impressions one gains first-hand. An example here in France is "French roast coffee," which in the US means a very dark, oily roast but which from what I have seen doesn't appear to exist in France--you won't find dark roast coffee in the supermarket, and you won't find it in a specialty coffee shop either. Where did this idea come from--was dark roast coffee popular in France in some earlier era? Or is it just someone's marketing strategy that has been so successful as to become ubiquitous?
Another term I have wondered about is "biodynamic French intensive gardening" or "French biointensive gardening"--passionately evoked in some organic farming and gardening circles in the US but which no French person I know has ever heard of. A little online sleuthing indicates that the origin of the idea in the US lies in the work of Alan Chadwick, creator of the famous garden project at the University of California--Santa Cruz in 1967. According to a retrospective written in 2007 by Chadwick Garden manager Orin Martin and published in the UCSC Farm & Garden News & Notes, "French intensive gardening" is the system "pioneered, not invented, by Chadwick" and still used at the UCSC Farm & Garden today. It consists of permanent beds, deep digging by hand, intensive spacing of plants, intercropping, careful attention to composting, an emphasis on transplanting as opposed to direct seeding and high labor inputs. Robert Kourik offered a similar summary in an article appearing in the Los Angeles Times in 1987.
Both Kourik and Martin say that Chadwick's system was a synthesis of several elements, most importantly Steinerian biodynamic thinking and the techniques of French market gardeners as perfected on the outskirts of Paris in the late 19th century. Both also note that the system was subsequently popularized by John Jeavons in his book, How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition. It was Jeavons who shortened the name to "biointensive gardening." Martin explains that the UCSC Farm & Garden staff dropped the biodynamic references after Chadwick's departure from the project, preferring the term "French intensive gardening" as less esoteric.
Martin also cites a couple of books published in England in the early years of the 20th century describing contemporary French market gardening techniques. This literature appears to reflect Chadwick's vision of French market gardening at its height, and is no doubt worth looking at more closely. Another such account can be found in the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin's book Fields, Factories and Workshops, first published in England in 1899. Kropotkin, who had lived in both France and England, describes the culture maraîchère in the area around Paris: the extensive use of transplants, the careful attention to the soil, the labor-intensive quality of the management. Market gardens thrived in this area not because of the proximity to Parisian markets, Kropotkin notes (in fact "a great number... export the whole of their produce to England"), but because of their ready access to Parisian stable manure, which they used not just for enriching the soil but also for heating their glasshouses and forcing beds.
In the 1912 edition of his book, Kropotkin emphasizes that English market gardening is likewise admired by Continental gardeners, and that French market gardening has "been lately introduced into England, with several manuals hav[ing] been published for that purpose." Finally, he sounds a cautionary note:
Another term I have wondered about is "biodynamic French intensive gardening" or "French biointensive gardening"--passionately evoked in some organic farming and gardening circles in the US but which no French person I know has ever heard of. A little online sleuthing indicates that the origin of the idea in the US lies in the work of Alan Chadwick, creator of the famous garden project at the University of California--Santa Cruz in 1967. According to a retrospective written in 2007 by Chadwick Garden manager Orin Martin and published in the UCSC Farm & Garden News & Notes, "French intensive gardening" is the system "pioneered, not invented, by Chadwick" and still used at the UCSC Farm & Garden today. It consists of permanent beds, deep digging by hand, intensive spacing of plants, intercropping, careful attention to composting, an emphasis on transplanting as opposed to direct seeding and high labor inputs. Robert Kourik offered a similar summary in an article appearing in the Los Angeles Times in 1987.
Both Kourik and Martin say that Chadwick's system was a synthesis of several elements, most importantly Steinerian biodynamic thinking and the techniques of French market gardeners as perfected on the outskirts of Paris in the late 19th century. Both also note that the system was subsequently popularized by John Jeavons in his book, How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, now in its 8th edition. It was Jeavons who shortened the name to "biointensive gardening." Martin explains that the UCSC Farm & Garden staff dropped the biodynamic references after Chadwick's departure from the project, preferring the term "French intensive gardening" as less esoteric.
Martin also cites a couple of books published in England in the early years of the 20th century describing contemporary French market gardening techniques. This literature appears to reflect Chadwick's vision of French market gardening at its height, and is no doubt worth looking at more closely. Another such account can be found in the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin's book Fields, Factories and Workshops, first published in England in 1899. Kropotkin, who had lived in both France and England, describes the culture maraîchère in the area around Paris: the extensive use of transplants, the careful attention to the soil, the labor-intensive quality of the management. Market gardens thrived in this area not because of the proximity to Parisian markets, Kropotkin notes (in fact "a great number... export the whole of their produce to England"), but because of their ready access to Parisian stable manure, which they used not just for enriching the soil but also for heating their glasshouses and forcing beds.
In the 1912 edition of his book, Kropotkin emphasizes that English market gardening is likewise admired by Continental gardeners, and that French market gardening has "been lately introduced into England, with several manuals hav[ing] been published for that purpose." Finally, he sounds a cautionary note:
And yet the Paris gardener is not our ideal of an agriculturist.... He toils, with but a short interruption, from three in the morning till late in the night. He knows no leisure; he has no time to live the life of a human being; the commonwealth does not exist for him; his world is his garden, more than his family.
Alan Chadwick's work establishing the UCSC garden was famously labor-intensive; but Orin Martin and others qualify this aspect of the system, noting that once you have established your beds and improved your soils, too much digging can be as dangerous as too little.
My views of French gardening are shaped in part by my experiences tending an allotment garden on the outskirts of Dijon. Compared to allotment gardens I've seen in England, the garden site here looks typically "French"--the plots are rigorously geometric, with cinder paths forming the main allées and a notable preference on the part of most of the gardeners for bare soil over the use of mulch. Is this French intensive gardening? Apart from the fact that I have never seen tomatoes in a French garden that were not interspersed with marigolds, you don't find a lot of companion planting or intercropping. Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, former INRA researchers who now operate a soil-management consultancy not far from Dijon, have written extensively about the loss of organic matter and soil biological activity in many French agricultural soils. As for myself, I have never worked such a heavy clay soil as the one in my Dijon garden, and I've had trouble finding a good source of quality, bulk compost. Perhaps this is linked to the French habit of pollarding most urban trees, with the result that there are fewer leaves available for urban composting?