The Man Who Planted Trees

“The Man Who Planted Trees” is a short story published in 1953 by French author Jean Giono. It chronicles a shepherd’s three-decade-long effort to reforest a barren tract of land in Southeastern France. Spanning a time period shortly before World War I until shortly after World War II, the story is both an antiwar allegory and an environmental allegory. “The Man Who Planted Trees” inspired numerous adaptations across various mediums, including a 1988 Academy Award-winning animated short and a 2016 sequel by environmentalist Gabriel Hemery.

This study guide refers to the 2015 edition published by Vintage Books.

In 1913 an unnamed narrator hikes alone for many days through Provence, a region in Southeastern France at the mouth of the Alps. As he runs out of water, the narrator arrives at a barren, deserted expanse where nothing grows except lavender. The only signs of civilization are a smattering of long-abandoned houses and a crumbling chapel.

After five hours of wandering with no water in sight, the narrator sees a shepherd surrounded by around 30 sheep. The shepherd, a 50-year-old man named Elzéard Bouffier, wordlessly offers him a drink of water from a flask. The narrator follows Bouffier back to his home, a sturdy and well-maintained stone house. With the nearest inhabited village over a day’s walk away, Bouffier invites the narrator to stay the night. That village, like all villages in this forbidding expanse, is populated by men who work as charcoal burners and live despairing existences.

That evening the narrator watches curiously as Bouffier pulls out a bag of acorns and separates out the 100 largest and least damaged nuts. He rejects the narrator’s offer to help, claiming that he must complete this task himself.

The next morning the narrator says he would like to stay another day with Bouffier so he can regain his strength. In truth, however, he wants to see what Bouffier plans to do with his acorns. Using a long steel rod, Bouffier creates deep holes in the ground in which he plants the acorns. Over the past three years he has planted over a 100,000 acorns this way. Out of those, he expects around 10,000 to grow and survive as oak trees. Bouffier began this endeavor shortly after the death of his wife and only child. The following day, the narrator continues his journey.

A year later in 1914, World War I breaks out. The narrator serves as an infantryman for the next four years, forgetting all about Bouffier and his oaks amid the horrors of war, particularly those he witnesses during the Battle of Verdun. In 1920, two years after the war ends, the narrator returns to Provence—less out of a desire to check on Bouffier’s progress and more because he longs for the peace, quiet, and clean air of that desolate landscape.

As he traces the same path he walked five years earlier, the narrator finally remembers the shepherd. He recalls, “I’d seen so many people die in the last five years I could easily imagine that Elzéard Bouffier must be dead too” (16). Yet Bouffier is alive, and so are thousands of his oaks, the oldest of which are taller than either man. The reappearance of trees causes a chain reaction, replenishing streams that had long run dry and rebirthing an ecosystem of willows, reeds, and meadows. In taking stock of the region’s miraculous recovery, the deeply traumatized narrator characterizes it as a “reason for living” (19).

Each year the narrator returns to check on Bouffier’s progress. By 1935, the forest is under the protection of the French State, whose officials believe the revitalized landscape is the result of natural phenomena. Bouffier’s work continues unabated until the start of World War II in 1939, when massive demand for fuel causes loggers to cut down some of the oaks. Fortunately, the forest is too isolated from main roads for the loggers to make much profit, and they abandon the work.

The narrator last sees Bouffier in June 1945, when the shepherd is 87 years old. The surrounding villages, once abandoned, now teem with young families. Moreover, the desperate and despairing charcoal burners have abandoned their trade to live off the land on quaint farms. The inhabitants of one village build a fountain and plant a lime tree next to it, which the narrator calls “an indisputable symbol of resurrection” (27). The narrator estimates that 10,000 people now live happily in the vicinity of the Edenic forest Bouffier willed into existence.

Two years later, Bouffier dies in a nearby hospice.