This is the statue of Jean Althen, and his story starts as a boy who lost everything. He was born about three hundred years ago, a long way east of here, in Armenian country under Persian rule. His father was a provincial governor, an ambassador, an important man. Then soldiers came, his father was killed, and the boy was taken and sold into slavery. He spent roughly fifteen years of his life as somebody's property in Asia Minor. And in those fifteen years, doing the work he was forced to do, he learned two crops very thoroughly. Cotton and a plant called madder. If you are wondering what Madder is, it is a root that is dug up, dried, and ground to get the most reliable and beautiful red dye in the world. Whole economies were built on it. And it grew in the fields where he was a slave. He escaped, got to Smyrna, got onto a ship, and came ashore at Marseille with nothing. However, legend says he did not arrive without anything. It is said he had hollowed out his walking staff and packed it with madder seeds, which was an offence punishable by death, because the people who grew madder had no intention of letting anyone else grow it. And if you look at this statue, you’ll see that he is holding on to a root. That’s madder, which changed this entire region. The time he landed in France was one when the country was spending enormous sums importing cotton and valuable dyes from abroad. So when Althen claimed he knew how to cultivate these crops himself, King Louis the Fifteenth took notice. The king received him, granted him a pension, and backed his experiments, hoping France could become less dependent on imports. But nature had other plans. Althen tried growing cotton in southern France, around places like Castres and Montpellier. But the plants struggled. Cotton needs long, hot summers and very specific growing conditions. The French climate simply was not reliable enough. Also, established industries such as the powerful silk merchants feared new competition, making it even harder for his project to succeed. After years of effort, the experiments failed. In this situation, many people would have given up. Althen did the opposite. Instead of forcing France to grow a crop that did not belong here, he turned to one that did. He began promoting madder. It thrived in the soils of Provence, transformed the local economy, and became so valuable that it earned the nickname "red gold." But, sadly, he died in poverty, in a village down the road, before any of his efforts paid off. Within a generation, the madder boom made this whole region rich and famous, and the man who brought the seeds did not live to see a franc of it. His original bronze statue was given to a village that had named itself after him, and the Nazi occupiers melted it down for the metal during the Second World War. What you are looking at is a replacement, put here in the years before the millennium. Follow the map to the next stop, which is right within this garden, where I’ll tell you about what lay here before it was transformed into this landscape. You can stand at the pin or listen to the stop as you explore the garden.