En route Provence

To find out what is called garrigue you had better not ask someone in Paris or a native in Calais when arriving from Great Britain. They may not know what garrigue is, unless they have come to the Midi and traveled through countryside, especially the great outdoors: hills and mountain ranges.

Garrigue is a low-lying, shrubby and mostly evergreen vegetation on limestone soils. It is composed by a specific and diversified flora, whose most representative species are kermes oak, rosemary, thyme, rock roses such as Montpellier cistus and white-leaved cistus, mastic tree, cade juniper, turpentine tree, gorse and fine-leaved crown.

Garrigue is a Mediterranean-type ecosystem, called “matorral” by international botanists. In Provence, it grows at low altitude (less than 700 meters).

This sort of vegetation is a degradation stage of the evergreen holm oak forest and generally lasts a few decades before the Aleppo pine forest will replace it, and much later the initial one.

Different types of garrigues may be identified by botanists, depending on the dominant species : kermes oak, rosemary, white-leaved cistus, Phoenician juniper, cade juniper, …, and on the distinctive features of the environment : slope aspect, type of soil (depth, nature, …), slope gradient, wind influence, distance from the sea, latitude, altitude, …