The Oasis, the small birth of a biodiverse Garden Book

When Simon and his family move, they find a sterile lawn as their backyard. In ten years, they transform it into an urban oasis, frequented by all sorts of animals and insects.
It started like this... Behind his new house, Simon finds a sterile lawn, bordered by gloomy hedges and a few trees. There's hardly any animal life. Without a plan and unhindered by knowledge or experience, he and his family get to work, and together they create an urban oasis in ten years, frequently visited by frogs, hedgehogs, birds, and insects. The Oasis is the account of those ten years and serves as a wonderful example of how every garden can contribute to biodiversity thanks to some enthusiasm and a pair of rolled-up sleeves.
The book is actually a (beautifully drawn) comic book, with slightly more text than usual; the love for nature and design radiates from it...

NRC review (by Stefan Nieuwenhuis):
Optimistic comic report about a biodiverse paradise
The main character Simon from the book is the French comic artist Simon Hureau (1977), who moves with his family from the city to a village house with an enormous piece of wasteland. With boundless enthusiasm, he throws himself into the garden. Out with the cotoneaster hedge; in with lilacs, blackthorn, and periwinkle. Within a year, the first birds arrive. Long-tailed tits, yellow wagtails, and nuthatches. The more diverse the plants, the more numerous and varied the fauna that comes to them. For ten years, Simon and his wife – who is never mentioned by name in the story – work on their biodiverse paradise. He is satisfied: "I won't save the planet, but on our modest patch of earth, life is doing quite well."

The Oasis is an ideal入門 comic, suitable for people who are not accustomed to reading graphic novels. Hureau clearly combines the characteristic comic idiom (reading direction, speech bubbles) with the nature guide and the diary. His story reads like a drawn report of his activities in the garden, in which he names and explains everything: from composting and pruning to feeding the earth. He uses arrows and captions to clarify his story; occasionally, he opts for an illustrative overview, for example, of lepidopteran butterflies he encounters. It remotely resembles Marjolein Bastin's nature books.