From stones to seeds: co-creating with nature

AVToday: How was Pebble Garden born?

Bernard: I come from the countryside. My childhood was spent in trees and ditches and rivulets and planting has been a passion since I was a child. I remember discovering, when I was seven, that a branch cut off from my neighbour’s Willow tree could take root and grow into a whole new tree. I was mesmerised! I started planting willow trees everywhere! My first forest, in fact, was in an abandoned tram station behind our house where I planted as many willow trees as I could!

When I came to Pondicherry in 1975, however, I came with the idea that I would work to build a city, to construct buildings. And it was only after two years of working in Matrimandir that I returned to my childhood dream of planting trees. For several years I worked in various farms in Auroville. In 1994, while working on Jurgen’s reforestation project in Mathur, I realised that this piece of land, where Pebble Garden stands now, belonged to Auroville. That year Deepika and I started to look after it.

And it was desert then?

Yes. When we started working here, the land was severely eroded and deserted. The soil was highly acidic clay. Moreover, this land was 60% pebbles – the remains of a river that ran here 20 million years ago. In spite of Peter Clarence-Smith’s great reforestation efforts in 1983, very few trees survived here. In the tropics, once you lose the protective tree cover, the soil deteriorates very fast. The combination of heavy rain and long dry periods washes top soil away in massive quantities.

But this has not always been so. In fact, the name of these districts, North and South Arcot, is derived from ‘Ara Kadu’ or ‘six forests’. These forests were inhabited by the Siddhars, and were dense with immensely valuable timber trees – ebony, teak and rosewood. When Francois Martin bought land on behalf of the French from the Nawab in 1703, these trees were cut and sold in France to raise money to build Pondicherry. And let’s not forget, Pondicherry was destroyed and looted three times by the British. Each time the French recovered it, more forests were cut to rebuild the city.

During the First World War, farmers in this area were asked to grow peanuts, which were a valuable resource in the war as it was much easier to cook with peanut oil than with lard. And the residue, the peanut cake, made good horse feed. So, the secondary forests were eliminated to grow peanuts. Now, in many parts of this area, the peanuts have been replaced by cashews.

Pebble Garden is a successful model of forest regeneration with minimal resources. What strategies did you use?

We made a clear decision from the start to work sustainably, employing only resources that were naturally available to us.

We wanted to allow the soil to recover naturally rather than bring in compost from outside. This was important for us because if you import soil from somewhere else you destroy one place to repair another. As India has 194 million hectares in the same condition as ours, it becomes impossible to follow such a method. We did not want to buy compost from the village as the village farmers needed this for their own field. We also wanted to work ourselves without hiring labour. This meant that we have had to devise simple, labour-efficient practices and work with resources that were available on the land.

We started by broadcasting acacia and dodonea seeds collected from neighbouring plots across the land. These fast-growing species have proved to be very effective pioneer trees for our conditions. The monsoon rain is all it takes for them to germinate and take root. Thereafter, they provide in a very short span of time a protective layer under which more hardy, native varieties can grow. They also produce a great deal of biomass, indispensable for restoring the soil’s fertility.

Our other trusted resource is the activity of the termites. Not only do they aerate and let moisture into the soil through their networks of underground tunnels, the earth they bring up has four times more nutrients that the original soil, thanks to the excreta and saliva. We use this soil to plant our saplings. And we make sure to plant just before the first monsoon rains are expected. This way, in years when the monsoon arrives on time, the seedlings need to be watered minimally or not at all.

Many reforestation projects strive to recreate the original indigenous ecology. What is your perspective on this?

In the past, I was very strict about planting only indigenous species of trees. Now, however, with climate change, I think that plant varieties in a region are bound to change and it is artificial to remain in any strict paradigm. Also, it has been found in reforestation projects in Brazil, for instance, that the introduction of new, exotic species actually improved and brought new dynamism to the whole plantation. Indigenous trees grown here include Pterocarpus santalinus, Hardwickia binata, Diospiros melanoxylon and Ximenia americana and Acacia. We have also introduced tree species from other places in India, such as Soymida februfuga, as well as Pterocarpus indicus, and Dalbergia melanoxylon from other parts of the world.

Our original vision was to grow timber trees in Pebble Garden. It was clear to me that to build Auroville we would need trees and we can’t always contribute to deforestation. But very few of our first plantation of rosewood survived and we realised we needed to follow a different strategy. Now, though we still have plots of land dedicated to timber trees – ebony, rosewood and teak – what we have is primarily a mixed forest.

How and when did the seed conservation centre start?

While both Deepika and I have been very interested in seeds and had been collecting seeds for years, it was in 2000 that Deepika’s interest in vegetables led to the creation of the vegetable garden with the specific aim of the conservation and multiplication of seeds.

Over the centuries, hundreds of local vegetable varieties were traditionally cultivated by people in their farms and kitchen gardens. Unfortunately, due to the onset of monoculture farming and GM seeds in the last decades, several of these varieties were lost. Several others, though they survive, are grown only in private gardens for personal use and many are on the verge of extinction. This has deeply compromised the nutritional profile of the food that reaches the average household.

Our work in seed conservation coincided with a national movement towards the revival of traditional, indigenous foods. Some years ago the Seed Festival Group began organising events across the country where farmers sold and exchanged rare, local varieties of seeds. In the beginning, though, it was primarily the seeds of grains that farmers were bringing to these festivals. Deepika was one of the first people to start making vegetable seeds available. In those early years, she sold all her seeds within half an hour of opening her stall.

From where did you source these seeds?

Deepika has been collecting seeds from farmers locally and when she travels. When farmers and seed activists from other parts of the country visited us, they brought seeds from their region, sometimes of endangered species. We have vegetables from Karnataka, Orissa, Assam, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, of course. In some cases we had seeds of vegetable varieties that were no longer grown in their place of origin. In this case we have been instrumental in returning these varieties to their original ecological and culinary habitat! This work has been appreciated very much. It has been Auroville’s contribution back to the country.

The Seed Conservation Centre currently supports more than 120 varieties of endangered traditional vegetable varieties from all over India, root crops, herbs, wild food crops, medicinal plants and flowers. We have 25 varieties of Brinjal, seven or eight varieties of Lady’s Finger. You see, there is still a highly specialised and varied culinary tradition in India. Each brinjal, for instance, is prepared in a different way. One is roasted, another is stir fried, still others are used for pickles. It is the same with gourds. While we ate some, others were used for making different string instruments. One variety was even used to make floaters for children to learn swimming with!

For the vegetable garden too you have devised innovative practices that have enabled you to remain self-sufficient.

Here again we have tried to develop easy, sustainable and labour-efficient practices, using natural resources that are already available to us. For example, to make the vegetable beds we don’t dig the land as is conventionally done. Instead we build beds from the ground up by layering acacia leaves with silt from natural depressions in the land. The rainwater that flows into these reservoirs brings the termite earth with it. Frogs and fish brought by egrets, defecate here. All this combined with the algae that grows in the water produces a rich, nutrient dense silt.

We layer acacia leaves with silt and charcoal to create the beds. Then in order to recreate the biodiversity of the tropics we first plant green manure seeds by mixing different types of plants, grasses, oil seeds, legumes. When these have grown for a month or two, the green biomass they produce is pulled out and mixed back into the soil. Then the soil is ready for planting vegetables. The diversity is necessary because it activates a variety of microorganisms. In this way, in three months we can go from stones to tomatoes and brinjals!

You also have a charcoal production unit. How does that work?

As we have a lot of wood on the land, especially from the acacia trees, we began to convert it into charcoal. Using charcoal for farming is an ancient technology. It was used by indigenous people in the Amazon forest to grow food during the Spanish invasion. It has been used here in Tamil Nadu in the mango and coconut plantations.

Charcoal is a very useful soil amendment. In the tropics, it is in the monsoons, when the highest concentration of nutrients is released into the soil that, due to overcast skies, photosynthesis in plants is greatly reduced. This means that when maximum food is available, plants have the least capacity to absorb it. With heavy rainfall, these critical nutrients leach out and go below the root zone of vegetables. It is here that charcoal becomes very useful. Acting as a temporary storehouse, it absorbs the nutrients on behalf of the plants until they recover their full metabolic capacity. Then, with the aid of small fungi, called mycillium, the plants’ roots recover these nutrients from the charcoal. The charcoal then becomes empty until the next rainy season. When charcoal is inoculated with nitrogen from human urine it also becomes a very valuable fertiliser.

What has been the impact of your work in Pebble Garden?

The seed conservation work at Pebble Garden has been appreciated for its contribution towards preserving and reviving the diversity of our traditional vegetable food sources. ‘A Garden for Everyone’ is our outreach initiative to share these hardy plant varieties, which have performed well on this wasteland, with home gardeners and subsistence farmers throughout India. Today, several farmers are multiplying and distributing seeds of indigenous vegetable varieties.

Over the years, farmers, city dwellers, activists, students and professionals have visited Pebble Garden and appreciated the transformation that has been achieved here. Some of these people have come with the intention of building a forest. Others have left with that seed planted in them! In the recent past, we have had visits from three different groups of young people, from the neighbouring village and from Chennai, who are joining resources and working communally to buy land and grow organic farms and forests. Many young people are returning to the land. This is very heartening to see.

As a forest that has been regenerated internally, without importing any resources from elsewhere, and without any expense, Pebble Garden is living proof of the restorative power of Mother Earth. Our role is that of co-creators. If we are attentive, attuned and can take a deep dive, heart and soul, into Nature’s realm, we can interact, in a constructive manner, in her unfolding.