Being a southerner, the oak is sociable. He lives with the maple of Montpellier, service-tree, the domestic sorb, the elm. In places which are a little fresher, if the soil  is deeper, it appears in the company of common maple, or more rarely of the charm and the lime. Like every good European, it affirms his taste for diversity, by also welcoming the following shrubs or small trees:  the cherry tree of Sainte-Lucia, the alaternus, the blood dogwood, the viburnum lantana, boxwood, the hazel tree. The edge of the forest, where it is more luminous, is appropriate for the honeysuckle of Étrurie, a Mediterranean wandering towards the west. We find another honeysuckle in  places which are more in the shade. We also have to add the privet, the hawthorn, some brambles and even junipers. Let us stop close to a bush, green the whole year round, of which one collects the branches in winter because they are trimmed with pretty red berries which appear to be glued to it. The leaves are prickly but they are not the leaves, in fact the branches took on this leaf-like form. It is called butcher’s broom, or fragon.
The ground of these forests also flowers: reprimand, euphorbia with the milky and irritating sap, hellebore which flowers green in winter, seal of Solomon, daphne, melittum oxymel flowering in pink and white, red blood geranium, the gromwell, whose seeds are similar to ivory pearls, and orchids which we describe as belonging to the forest, epipactis, cephalantère pink, yellow or white. Let us stop next to a limodore; this orchid has the appearance of violet coloured asparagus. It synthesizes only very little chlorophyll, not enough to live on. So, it will supply itself with her friend the mushroom, which itself, since it does not manufacture chlorophyll, must go and get some at the end of the rootlets of an oak. We are in the presence of an eternal triangle. Yet an other example of the complexity of the relationship between these living beings which "vegetate", safe from a soil crawling with life and energy.
There is also the star-of-Bethlehem of the Pyrenees, with the star like flowers clarifying the deep greenery. In this fresh shade, you can also find the pulmonaria with the white spotted leaves, and the arums, which imprison small flies in order to ensure their fecundation, and which will later  exhibit bunches of toxic orange balls on a short stem. At the boundary of the trees and shrubs, at the edge of the light, a small broom spreads out over the ground, the hairy broom. A stem clings to our steps, the madder. And everywhere, on the ground and the trunks, ivy.
The list is not closed, these forests have much to say. But it is advisable to evoke some general information now.
These wood are little exploited, the trees live their life of a tree, with the time of the trees, they germinate, grow, bear fruit, die, and decompose, thereby nourishing in their turn the ground which nourished them. The plants, the animals, the mushrooms escort these successive cycles. This context deserves all our attention, because the forests are subjected today to a strong forestry development pressure, the old characteristic trees are uprooted in favour of fast growing ones, like conifers which destroy the characteristic habitat. This is not the case on the plateau. We still have living forests, as we saw, favourable to a great number of plants, but also to many animal species. Here, this forestry entirety varies, changes, renews itself according to the hazards of its own life. It has become rare. Thus precious.