the Egyptian monks and hermits of the fourth and fifth centuries are commonly known as the ‘desert fathers’, a misleading phrase in a modern context, since ‘desert’ connoted ‘uninhabited’ from early on, and the monks of Egypt were frequently able to practise very fruitful agriculture in their ‘deserts’. In the West the ‘desert’ meant the wilderness, which produced its own difficulties for the development of agriculture in comparison to the Nile valley. Nonetheless, the fruitfulness of the uncultivated wilderness became established as a theme early on in the West. In the sixth century, Gregory of Tours described the ‘recluse’ Marianus as having ‘no other food except the fruits of the field’, and while sometimes people would bring him some honey otherwise he would subsist on what ‘he could find in the woods’. He is eventually found dead ‘lying beneath an apple tree’. The context of the wilderness brings a contrast to the stories of the Egyptian Fathers, so many of whom were fed miraculously by angels. Certainly, Gregory of Tours was describing the bountifulness of nature in a way that is surely meant to reflect on God's providence, but not in a particularly miraculous fashion. It was just about possible, if somewhat heroic, to live off the fruits of the wilderness in the West, while this would have been impossible in Egypt.