Champagne, France

This scene is an original illustration set in Champagne, France. It lies in mid-latitudes, where the climate is oceanic — mild, wet through the year.

A harvested wheat plain of stubble gold runs to the horizon. Big round straw bales sit in a loose line, one close in the foreground. A single row of tall slender poplars crosses the midground, and a small herd of pale cattle grazes beyond. The evening light comes in almost level.

Why plant poplars in a single line across farmland?

Poplars planted in a single line are a field boundary and a windbreak at once, a habit of open continental farmland in western Europe. Round bales rather than stacked sheaves mean mechanised harvest. Wheat this far north ripens late, so stubble gold in a still-warm evening puts the date at midsummer's end. The absolute flatness is old sedimentary basin, not river plain.

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