The great event (and the wish) of changing things occurred in 1990; I changed habits, occupation, way of living, ideas... with a man next to me, an architect but botanic as choice of life; a lover of little things, a big curious, owner of a nice small house, recently renewed, completely immersed in a jungle of brambles, distributed on several small terraces, delightful but invisible, unreachable... and overlooking one of this rare streams still genuine and inviolated, situated just at middle mountain, so close to the sea.

Unique.

We really worked with a will to remove fifty years of neglect and decay, to cut primigenial hanks of wrapped brambles, to mow, to deforest, to clear up and tidy... three years later all showed its real beauty, everything had been settled down, extended and restored... the terraced walls' rhythm, the huge stream's stones so similar to elephants at the watering-place, bright and shining in their recovered shapes...

But what to do now?

I don't remember who was the one that first pronounced the magic word: bamboo! But I remember that moment as the beginning of a competition between us, made of searching of magazines, rare books, catalogues (always precious for us), and of piling up useful and useless things, without a real attentive and logical choice, but following the disordered logic of falling in love, of drug addiction... talking about what was becoming a big, definitive, ultimate love...

To which I will remain loyal for the rest of our life…

Today, while the dried olive trees have given place to more than 100 different species of bamboo;

today, while the small house (enough extended) is situated between a gashing stream and a tufted turquoise forest;
today, while I've remained alone to talk with my joyful bamboos;

today, my problems are different...

Today I am not satisfied if the buds only grows 30 cm a day, as they grow differently in the tropical countries...

Today I lose my temper when my Phyllostachys Pubescens doesn't want to give me bigger stems, in spite of my loving care...

Today... I am so involved with my bamboos, the source of thousand satisfactions...