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★★★ Winner of the Blois Festival Centreval de Loire Prize ★★★
★★★ New work from the Angoulême International Comics Festival award-winning author ★★★

"A book I want to keep for a lifetime."_〈France.TV〉
“It makes you want to roll up your sleeves.”_〈Southwest〉

The garden is alive, more than you think!

From a neglected garden to an oasis teeming with life
A book about encountering life and nature that invites and welcomes you.

The graphic novel "Gardening" by author Simon Wira, which was created over a period of ten years while tending a garden, has been published by Kim Young Publishing.
As the original title, L'Oasis, suggests, this is a story about a garden that serves as an oasis in an urban desert filled with artificial objects.
When people think of a garden, many think of a quiet, man-made landscape with neatly maintained flowers and plants, but in reality, a garden is not as static a space as we might think.
Plants grow every minute and every second, and no two plants are the same, attracting animals that seek nutrients and homes, ignorant of human boundaries.
Even a seemingly quiet garden, if you look closely, is always bustling with various creatures, and when creatures meet, various events are bound to occur.
This book takes you on a thorough look at this small but vibrant garden.

Chasing moths, moving snails, saving snakes…
A vivid report on the joys and sorrows of gardening.

One day, the author, feeling the urgency of the ecological crisis, decides to restore ecological diversity in a small space with his own hands.
Then, trusting only my intuition and without any special preparation, I moved to a house with a garden.
This book shows the author's gardening process step by step, starting immediately after moving in, allowing the reader to experience the garden as a sweaty, labor-intensive field.
Clear away the long-neglected red clover bushes in the garden and plant plants found on the roadside, discarded irises and water hyacinths.
We are forming new relationships not only with small plants but also with trees and stones.
The author uses stones to create steps for small animals to climb into the bathing pond, or to create structures to decorate the space.
In this garden where gaps are being filled, countless insects and animals come to visit on their own.
The woodpile becomes a haven for reptiles, and toads and hedgehogs come to rest on the stacked branches.
But it's not always the guests who are welcome.
What should a gardener do when wasps nest in a tree or snails overflow? What if moths are causing disease in the tree? What if a cat keeps catching and harming birds? The story of a gardener exploring ways to coexist with other life forms through trial and error, through hard work and effort, demonstrates that while we cannot fully control nature, we can be creative and coexist with other creatures.

A new plant and animal book completed with clear and transparent watercolor illustrations.
A new sense of nature brought about by cartoonish depictions

Paper books and pictures have become the primary medium through which many city dwellers encounter plants and animals.
Many children and adults are encountering and learning about non-human creatures through picture books, plant illustrations, animal picture books, and animations.
This graphic novel, published in France, also demonstrates a new grammar for drawing plants and animals.
The detailed yet distinct borders, cartoonish exaggeration and simplification, and depictions of non-human species and non-verbal communication offer a new perspective and sensibility on plants and animals.
In particular, about 100 species of insects, which are the main guests of the garden, are described in the author's characteristically detailed manner and even have their scientific names written down, so much so that this book can be considered a beautiful insect guide.
The story unfolds along the narrative of tending a garden, but it does not miss a single one of the small creatures that appear here and there, and it is depicted visually and audibly on the page.
As Gilles Clermont, a professor at the Versailles National School of Landscape Architecture, writes in the preface, after reading this book, you will vaguely feel that communication in gardens is “the only language we can truly use freely.”
And in these desperate times, when news reports surface that 7.8 billion bees died in South Korea alone last winter, we can also recognize the small sliver of hope that always remains within our grasp.