Fertilities
This text presents a description of the plant world of an oasis in pre-Saharan Morocco (Souss region) by emphasizing the daily presence of elderly women from very modest backgrounds, who come daily to weed and collect spontaneous plants. These women have a special relationship with the latter and transpose their nourishing, prophylactic, therapeutic or magical powers to the oasis community as a whole. But the question arises of what will happen to this field of relationships, so integrated into fertility cycles, in the wake of the structural transformations and modernization projects currently under way in oasis areas. These projects, while supporting environmentalist objectives, affirm a modality of qualification of the soil and its exploitation that tends to eclipse the presence of these women, neglecting at the same time the whole cosmological background on which their attentive gestures draw, and the sensate permeability of the oasis plant universe of which they are the custodians.