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truth: he’d gone and sold the almonds for us and this was exactly the amount of money he’d got for them: no secret cut for himself.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Salud.
    ‘Brought you this,’ he said, and he pulled out a small jam jar from his jacket pocket with a creamy-brown paste inside.
    ‘For your hand,’ he said to Salud.
    ‘Is it – is it herbal, like the stuff you used yesterday? Salud asked.
    ‘Made it myself,’ he said nodding. ‘You can use that for anything – any skin problems,’ he said. ‘Just rub it on at night.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘Helps the healing.’
    *
    Understanding of the scale of my ignorance is growing by the day. Planting trees seems such a simple operation at first: get tree, dig hole, put tree in it, then wait twenty or thirty years. Do this several hundred times and you’ll end up with a wood, or a small forest. But there are endless questions before you can get to this stage. Which trees? Will they be suited to the soil? The altitude? The weather conditions here? This is a Mediterranean climate, which means long, dry summers, so anything I plant has to be drought-proof. Which seems simple enough, until I realise there are all kinds of sub-categories of ‘Mediterranean’ with prefixes like ‘meso’ or ‘supra’. Some trees will be all right in one, but not another. But I don’t even know which one we’re in! And then there are the winters to consider: it gets cold here – I’m sure temperatures regularly drop to around minus five in late December and early January. So anything we put in the ground has to be able to cope with that as well. All of which makes me start wondering how anything grows up here at all.
    One place to start would be to look around at what’s already here, but again I end up running into more brick walls, not least the fact that I can barely identify a single plant species on our land. I know which are the almond trees, but only because they were the first ones to be pointed out to me, that plus the fact that we’ve got about a hundred of them. Show me an almond tree elsewhere, though, and I might be stumped to recognise it.
    And then there’s all this business about mulching and pruning and God knows what. In desperation I’ve turned to Ibn al-Awam, the only complete book on agriculture I’ve got on my shelves. Although it remains to be seen how much help a medieval Andalusian farmer can give me.
    The
Kitab al-Falaha
– The Book of Agriculture – is a Moorish masterpiece from the twelfth century, sometimes described as ‘the greatest of all medieval treatises on agriculture’. A two-volume work by a Sevillian gentleman farmer, Yahya ibn Muhammad Ibn al-Awam, it was rediscovered in the mid-eighteenth century in the Escorial library just north of Madrid, having lain forgotten for hundreds of years. The book was a detailed manual for running a farm, with tips on everything from irrigation of the land to keeping horses and even bees. It was written in a surprisingly technical, almost scientific style: ‘I establish no principle in my work that I have not first proved by experiment on repeated occasions,’ the author asserted. This didn’t prevent him from adding all kinds of eccentric ideas about farming and land management, however. (
If you want to grow coriander without sowing any seeds, take the testicles of a goat and plant them in the earth and water them. Later you will see coriander grow up where no seeds had been planted
.) And it was filled with quotations and tips from his Greek- and Latin- as well as Arabic-speaking predecessors. One of the interesting things one could gleam from his writing was how the weather had probably changed since his time: one of his recommendations, for example, was that almonds should be picked in August, an indication, perhaps, that the month hadn’t been quite as hot then as it is today.
    Apart from the fact that he lived in the Aljarafe district of Seville – a city four hundred miles to the