2007
Inspiration
Art and nature walk Green Revolution(a landscape in revolutionary change)
Story
The wooded area where since 2005 art in nature has been organized actually came into being only a short time ago. In the past this area was mainly wasteland consisting of heath, drifting sand and peat pools. As early as the period of peat digging wood was planted on grounds that were unsuitable for farming (about 1870). In the 1920s afforestation went on rapidly. By means of the efforts of unemployed people, who during the worldwide economic depression were more or less forced to do this work, the whole area was covered with various species of conifers and decidious trees such as pine, spruce, Japanese larch, douglas, hemlock, indigenous oak, beech and American oak. The cobble-stone road that intersects the forest was also constructed in the time of economic crisis as a project for unemployed people. The road was made up of thousands of boulders dating from the ice age, which appeared from the subsoil during the afforestation and cultivation. Now this characteristic road is part of the so-called Pieterpadroute. Meanwhile the process of afforestation continued until about 1948. The last large sections were planted with trees immediately behind the glaciated pit. At the time a certain Jan Dam worked here as a 14-year-old postman and he remembers very well that he cycled across the plain without seeing any trees. Only heath and peat pools stretched out as far as the eye reached. So the landscape round Schoonoord has changed radically and in a revolutionary way. This silent green revolution realized by unemployed people is the theme for 2007.
‘The Shepherd’ - Louis Albert Roessingh ( 1873 – 1951)
The painting (around 1918) shows the environment of Schoonoord like it was in the early 2oth century: waste land, poor heatherfield the place to be for the shepherd and his sheep ( property of: Drents Museum, Assen)
