Over the seasons, a remarkable lesson in cohabitation, filmed up to insects, to the vegetable patch, where everything is a matter of balance between prey and predators.
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entomophobes abstain. This report to the XXL zoom on the life of aphids, bumblebees, bees, butterflies, but also snails residing in the vegetable patch, is not for those who panic at the sight of an insect. All the others, on the other hand, should find an interest in the day after International Day of Biodiversity of UNESCO.
In particular the 16 million French people who cultivate their own fruits and vegetables themselves ( according to Franceinfo, May 4 ). Gardening has been experiencing renewed interest for two years, thanks to confinements, for the pleasure of eating better and being outdoors, and more recently, by economy.
It should be specified, the filming location is a organic vegetable garden -without pesticides -, bucolic, idyllic, with its elegantly irregular wooden barrier, its retro watering, its balanced massifs and its temperate climate. Two years of filming have made it possible to maximize the rare scenes, which have become essential to seduce spectators accustomed to time-laps (accelerated) and close-ups since 1996 and the release of microcosmos.
The scenario follows the four seasons and begins at the end of winter. The little Queen of Bourdons, who then comes out of hibernation, is one of the stars of the film. The camera will follow it in its quest for a house, in its installation in a burrow, filming its first laying, with amazing plans of the young Hymenoptère covering her eggs. Outside, what looks like a baobab is only a fennel seen from the ground.
The gardener is watchman
The environmental challenge of the film is to demonstrate that it is possible to have a beautiful vegetable garden without killing these insects, but on the contrary “with” them. On condition, however, to accept to sacrifice a tiny part of the harvest to feed these little animals. The key therefore consists, to limit this quota, to balance the relationship between prey and predators, so that no species takes precedence over the other. The gardener gets watchr. A hand, a silhouette sometimes looms, but the real actors are not human.
Let us take the example of a plant of beans invaded with aphids, real black warriors, numerous, impressive. While ants play the role of shepherds, the salvation of the beans will come from a delicate but formidable green chrysop, capable of hanging its tiny eggs for fine sons. Having become “plump larvae” and voracious, these are nicknamed the lions of aphids. Everything is said.
Each season conceals its small miracles, like summer, the birth of babies translucent snails and already fitted with their shell. But also his dramas. Even real horror scenes, after a parasitoid wasp caught the SOS of a cauliflower attacked by the caterpillar of a cabbage pieride …
The wasp then plants his dart in the body of the caterpillar. “She has placed a time bomb,” warns La Voix Off, since she laid her eggs. Having become larvae, they will devour the caterpillar from the inside before leaving it by small holes … without killing it. “The larvae have spared its vital organs and handled its brain so that it is at their service.” A nightmare.
unconscious of the atrocity of what is played at his feet, the gardener will soon rejoice naively with his beautiful harvest of eggplant, beans, salads, tomatoes and cauliflowers.