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Rating: 
Summary: A Pleasure to Read and Ponder
Review: Except for a short teaching job in Corsica, Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915) spent his life in a tiny area of western Provence. When his teaching duties and family responsibilities permitted, he studied everything in the small world around him with such careful attention and clear vision that he became one of the greatest natural historians of his time. Charles Darwin called Fabre "an incomparable observer" and Victor Hugo dubbed him "the insect's Homer." For over forty years, he scrimped to afford a piece of fallow land - L'Harmas - where he could observe native plants, birds, animals and insects in their own habitat; where, as he wrote, "I could ...engage in that difficult conversation whose questions and answers have experiment for their language." The essays in "A Passionate Observer" date from the happy period of his residence at L'Harmas. He writes poetically of the song and life of the cicada, the weeds and the insects attracted to them, the life teeming in and around a small pond. Like other scientists born before the invention of photography, Fabre perfected the art of verbal description, and his writings provide models of exact and evocative prose. The essays "My Schooling" and "Heredity" reminded us of Marcel Pagnol's memoirs of his childhood in Provence. We read this book before one of our visits to Provence, and found our way to the site of Fabre's home and garden, now a national museum still called L'Harmas. (In the Rhone Valley, take the D976 road northwest of Orange to Serignan-du-Comtat. The route to L'Harmas is well-marked once you get close to Serignan. Avoid Orange if possible as it's unfortunately a constant traffic jam.) We stood at the gate in the wall and rang the bell to alert the caretaker of our arrival. As with many Provencal museums, the caretaker and his wife are local folk, happy to answer questions about their local hero. We visited Fabre's study, on the second floor of his home, which doubled as his herbarium, pleased to tiptoe around the workroom and laboratory of this great scholar. Floor-to-ceiling glass cases house his exhaustive natural history collections of local birds and their eggs, insects, mineral specimens, his library and his collections of antiquities. We studied the 19th century globe on his mantel, on which "Californie" is a remote and apparently unexplored territory and our own Oregon unmarked. An annex displays over a hundred delicate watercolors of mushrooms and fungi of Provence that Fabre painted, and the modest child's paintbox that he used, as well as Fabre's coin collection and local archaeological finds, including much Roman material. We most enjoyed reading an original letter from Charles Darwin, one of Fabre's correspondents. The French government unfortunately turned the wild area outside - L'Harmas - that Fabre so eagerly sought for his study of native species into an arboretum full of exotics; we would have much preferred to see Fabre's native plants. As our daughter Anne put it: "Why go around the world to see incense cedars, when they grow in our backyard?" Nevertheless, the arboretum encourages a pleasant walk through interesting plants from around the globe, and is home to local birds. Many of the plant contributions to the arboretum are from Japan, where Fabre inspires almost as much reverence as he does in his native France. In this garden we enjoyed visiting with a few other pilgrims to L'Harmas, including folks from Paris, Scotland, England and Japan. Any student of natural history will enjoy Fabre's essays on the development of a naturalist's sensibility, and any reader who wants to visit Provence prepared to appreciate the landscape that they will encounter should pick up this treasure of a book. It's beautifully bound, artfully designed and illustrated. (Our copy would be tidier if my ethnobotanist husband hadn't stuck so many post-it notes in it as page markers, but that's a tribute to the value of the text.) Marlene McLoughlin's charming watercolors of perched villages, Provencal birds and insects, flowers, fruits, fields and village streets - found on almost every page - are alone worth the price of the book.
Rating:
Summary: A Pleasure to Read and Ponder
Review: Except for a short teaching job in Corsica, Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915) spent his life in a tiny area of western Provence. When his teaching duties and family responsibilities permitted, he studied everything in the small world around him with such careful attention and clear vision that he became one of the greatest natural historians of his time. Charles Darwin called Fabre "an incomparable observer" and Victor Hugo dubbed him "the insect's Homer." For over forty years, he scrimped to afford a piece of fallow land - L'Harmas - where he could observe native plants, birds, animals and insects in their own habitat; where, as he wrote, "I could ...engage in that difficult conversation whose questions and answers have experiment for their language." The essays in "A Passionate Observer" date from the happy period of his residence at L'Harmas. He writes poetically of the song and life of the cicada, the weeds and the insects attracted to them, the life teeming in and around a small pond. Like other scientists born before the invention of photography, Fabre perfected the art of verbal description, and his writings provide models of exact and evocative prose. The essays "My Schooling" and "Heredity" reminded us of Marcel Pagnol's memoirs of his childhood in Provence. We read this book before one of our visits to Provence, and found our way to the site of Fabre's home and garden, now a national museum still called L'Harmas. (In the Rhone Valley, take the D976 road northwest of Orange to Serignan-du-Comtat. The route to L'Harmas is well-marked once you get close to Serignan. Avoid Orange if possible as it's unfortunately a constant traffic jam.) We stood at the gate in the wall and rang the bell to alert the caretaker of our arrival. As with many Provencal museums, the caretaker and his wife are local folk, happy to answer questions about their local hero. We visited Fabre's study, on the second floor of his home, which doubled as his herbarium, pleased to tiptoe around the workroom and laboratory of this great scholar. Floor-to-ceiling glass cases house his exhaustive natural history collections of local birds and their eggs, insects, mineral specimens, his library and his collections of antiquities. We studied the 19th century globe on his mantel, on which "Californie" is a remote and apparently unexplored territory and our own Oregon unmarked. An annex displays over a hundred delicate watercolors of mushrooms and fungi of Provence that Fabre painted, and the modest child's paintbox that he used, as well as Fabre's coin collection and local archaeological finds, including much Roman material. We most enjoyed reading an original letter from Charles Darwin, one of Fabre's correspondents. The French government unfortunately turned the wild area outside - L'Harmas - that Fabre so eagerly sought for his study of native species into an arboretum full of exotics; we would have much preferred to see Fabre's native plants. As our daughter Anne put it: "Why go around the world to see incense cedars, when they grow in our backyard?" Nevertheless, the arboretum encourages a pleasant walk through interesting plants from around the globe, and is home to local birds. Many of the plant contributions to the arboretum are from Japan, where Fabre inspires almost as much reverence as he does in his native France. In this garden we enjoyed visiting with a few other pilgrims to L'Harmas, including folks from Paris, Scotland, England and Japan. Any student of natural history will enjoy Fabre's essays on the development of a naturalist's sensibility, and any reader who wants to visit Provence prepared to appreciate the landscape that they will encounter should pick up this treasure of a book. It's beautifully bound, artfully designed and illustrated. (Our copy would be tidier if my ethnobotanist husband hadn't stuck so many post-it notes in it as page markers, but that's a tribute to the value of the text.) Marlene McLoughlin's charming watercolors of perched villages, Provencal birds and insects, flowers, fruits, fields and village streets - found on almost every page - are alone worth the price of the book.
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