“Concrete is hotter than earth. You shouldn’t put it everywhere”: Gaétan, 14, recorded the lesson about the “mobile garden” that travels from school to school on a trailer in Burgundy to remind children of “the importance of nature”.
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“Come on, press the red button,” the presenter says to an intimidated teenager. A jet of water then flows into a Plexiglas cylinder in which layers of grass soil, pebbles and rocky ground follow each other. “You see, the water is absorbed. While there…” he said, releasing a stream of water onto concrete and stones, “the water overflows and doesn’t stay.”
AFP
“Oh yes!” say the astonished teenagers of a third year class at the Le Vallon college in Autun (Saône-et-Loire), watching as the water floods the “mobile garden”, a six-meter-long by two-meter-long one on wooden boards a bit like raised vegetable gardens. But this garden is on wheels.
“We wanted to reach young people and that’s why we decided to offer them a garden,” explains Xavier Poillot, president of the National Union of Landscape Contractors (UNEP) in Burgundy-Franche-Comté.
AFP
The “mobile garden,” a new concept in France, was therefore moved to schools in the region for a year to “explain the importance of nature and the consequences of the lack of nature,” said Poillot.
AFP
“It’s a real garden on a caravan,” he says, with a mini-forest of maples, oaks and other hornbeams, a grassy corner, another for aromatic plants… and in the middle a very bare area of concrete and stones, like the soils of our cities.
“Look here…” the President said to the schoolchildren, pointing to the corner of the mini-forest: “The trees attract water, sweat and spit out moisture, causing the temperature to drop,” he explains, showing a thermometer mark “ 18 degrees”. “While next door there is a heat island in the concrete,” he continues in front of another thermometer that reads “35 degrees.” “These are average temperatures measured in summer,” he explains.
AFP
“That is why we must avoid artificial development of the land,” concludes the President.
About 300 schoolchildren were affected in one year of the operation: “We will have at least raised the students’ awareness,” estimates Franck Furtin, national president of the UNEP Communications Commission. “If they can plant a tree in their garden later, that’s good.”