Planting the OptFORESTS Mediterranean common garden in southern France

Planting seedlings for a provenance test is easy, right? You just need to find the right place, prepare the soil appropriately, lay out your experimental design, choose the right time for planting, wait for nice seedlings to arrive and get everyone started. 

Well, not so easy for the common garden which was planted last January in the Maures mountains of southern France, just inland of the French Riviera. First, southern France is mostly calcareous, which does not work for species such as chestnut or maritime pine which cannot tolerate active calcium. Fortunately, there are two mountains between Marseille and the French-Italian border which are old acidic metamorphic areas. And after months of negotiations with all stakeholders, our team found a nice 1.2 ha plot in a state forest, a former chestnut tree grove with a few remaining ancient, barely alive and huge chestnut trees. The hardest stakeholder to convince was a reptile, Hermann’s tortoise (Testudo hermanni Gmelin), a land tortoise protected in France under Natura 2000. Removing the animals to avoid them being crushed by mechanical brush clearing and soil preparation (a 1 meter deep ripper tooth) required specially trained dogs and their human partner, for sniffing tortoises out and manually removing the animals outside of the site if need be. Read more...