Maquis (Mediterranean Scrubland)

What is maquis?

Maquis is the dense, hard-leaved shrubland that covers much of the Mediterranean. The Italian name is macchia, the French maquis, and English has borrowed the French. Its plants share one striking feature: small, thick, often leathery and aromatic leaves that lose as little water as possible. That is not decoration, it is how a plant survives five rainless months.

Height gives the rough divisions. Where tree-form species carry the stand, holm oak, cork oak, strawberry tree, mastic, Phillyrea and juniper, it is called high macchia and can reach several metres. Where it stays lower it is low macchia. Where soil is shallow and stony and the cover breaks into patches under about knee height, the name changes to garrigue, in Italian gariga. These limits are approximate; the literature draws them differently, and the plants ignore them.

Sardinia's own environmental service names the leading species of the island's macchia plainly: strawberry tree, mastic, juniper, wild olive, rock roses, myrtle, Phillyrea, heather, broom, rosemary, viburnum and spurge. Toward garrigue the list shifts to thyme, everlasting, cistus and spurge. Sardinian variants are distinct enough to be mapped separately in the regional forest classification.

European nature law protects these formations by type rather than by name. The relevant Annex I habitats are arborescent matorral with juniper, thermo-Mediterranean scrub, and Olea and Ceratonia forests. None of them is a priority habitat, but all three appear regularly in Sardinian Natura 2000 site records.

One detail matters for reading statistics. In Italian forest inventory, macchia is not counted as forest but as other wooded land. In the 2005 national inventory, Sardinia held roughly 583,000 hectares of forest and roughly 630,000 hectares of other wooded land, together about 1.2 million hectares, more than any other Italian region. The figure is from 2005 and should be read as that.

How Terra Humana understands it

Macchia covers the steeper slopes of Sa Medada, and understanding it correctly decides how we work there.

The official landscape survey of the Ogliastra describes the district's macchia as a stage of degradation of the oak woodland that stood there before, lost to fire and overgrazing, and it notes how extremely slowly soil rebuilds on limestone. Read carelessly, that sounds like a verdict against the shrubs. It is not.

We see macchia as an achievement under difficult conditions. It is what still holds the thin soil, what keeps some moisture in the system, and what shelters the animals. Clearing it to plant would be the fastest way to lose both the soil and the shade, and the species that live in it are not a lesser form of life than the trees that preceded them.

At the same time we do not treat it as an endpoint. It sits in a succession that can move on if the pressures that stopped it are lifted. Our work is to lift those pressures and to add what is missing, not to replace what is there.