Hortillonnages — A Wetland Turned into Market Gardens
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Transcript
East of the centre, the Hortillonnages form a network of cultivated plots divided by channels. The name comes from an old local word for market gardeners. For centuries, growers used the wet ground of the Somme valley to supply Amiens with vegetables.
These were productive landscapes rather than pleasure gardens. Boats moved workers and produce through channels too narrow for roads. Modern recreation now shares space with a much smaller commercial gardening tradition.
The site matters because it reverses a common city-versus-nature story. People did not simply preserve a natural marsh; they engineered a wetland into an agricultural system whose ecological character then became heritage.