An ancient wood in springtime, deep in the Hampshire countryside. There are bluebells and daisies and patches of wild garlic and, there in the dappled sunlight, a group of women cutting wands of coppiced hazel. They are singing as they work.
A traditional English rural scene? Not quite. The women wielding the machetes are rainforest dwellers from Cameroon, and the tunes they are singing are the traditional songs of the Baka people. The hazel sticks they are gathering will form the structure of a mongulu, or leaf house.
There is, however, one undeniably traditional aspect to this scene. Next week, the mongulu they are building will form the centrepiece of a garden at that most English of cultural events, the Chelsea Flower Show.
Among the painstakingly crafted show gardens and immaculate floral arrangements that are the pride of Chelsea, these women will be putting on a display that has an importance more lasting and fundamental than the passing perfection of some delicate bloom.
The first time that an indigenous people have come to Chelsea to help create a garden, the Green & Black’s Rainforest Garden tells the story of how their lives are being devastated by the destruction of the rainforest, their homes destroyed and their way of life reduced to little more than a memory. A chainsaw, a gun and a miner’s helmet represent the threats to their livelihood from logging, poaching and mining.
“These people live incredibly simple lives,” said Jane Owen, the writer and broadcaster who dreamed up the project after a trip to Cameroon last year and who created the garden with designer Ann-Marie Powell. “They ask for very little. And yet it is being taken away from them.”
Such a powerful story, she felt, needed telling by the Baka people. But embarking on such an ambitious project was never going to be easy.
On the day that The Newspaper met the women at a house in Southwest London, they saw for the first time since arriving the Ngongo leaves they had brought over from Cameroon to form the roof of the mongulu. Glossy, thick and wonderfully waterproof when they were fresh, the leaves had dried out and were all but useless. The women were crestfallen. “It took us so much time to cut them in the forest, a whole day,” said Margerite Akom, 45, who has never travelled outside Africa before. “Now they are dry we are not happy.”
Fortunately, reinforcements should be in place by the time the women build the mongulu tomorrow: 90 banana leaves from the Canaries are on order with an importer.
To the outsider, an English woodland would seem a pale imitation of equatorial rainforest. To the women, however, even the woods of West Tytherley in Wiltshire, elicited an outbreak of unrestrained joy. “They were quite clearly enchanted by it,” said Ms Owen. “As soon as they got the machetes in their hands and were in the woodland they were singing, they were so happy.” Ms Akom was so bewitched by the wild garlic that she was taking some back to the rainforest.
But the home she is taking it to is not the home she knew. Displaced from their villages by an assortment of logging and mining operations, the women’s families are now forced to live in roadside clearings outside the forest. “They promised us so many things — roads, hospitals, schools, employment,” said Jeanne Noah, 54, the grandmother who is the oldest of the group. “But we have had nothing.”
A whole way of life has gone. The water in their rivers, polluted by industry, is no longer drinkable. The animals they used to hunt have disappeared. Even the bubinga tree, which they embue with mystical powers — tradition says they cannot approach it without taking their clothes off — and that used to provide them with medicinal potions has all but disappeared from their lives.
“This is an opportunity for them to speak to some of the most important people in Britain,” said Ms Owen. “More FTSE 100 CEOs go to Chelsea than any other single event. And these communities are as close as you will ever get to an eloquent rainforest. It is like the rainforest speaking.”