When he arrived on earth, the Little Prince had only one problem: baobabs. The mysterious boy from a small planet, so tiny that it was actually an asteroid, the B-612, appears in the middle of the desert in the story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and asks the aviator stranded in the sand to draw a sheep . "On the third day I learned about the drama of the baobabs," writes the narrator of El Príncipito (Salamandra / Alianza Editorial). And so he discovers what he needs the sheep for: his planet is so small that if he lets the baobabs grow they will eat it whole and that's why he's forced to root them out when they're still a bush. The animal can help you by eating the weeds.
This is how the narrator of the story explains the situation: “There were terrible seeds on the planet of the Little Prince… They were the seeds of baobabs. The planet earth was infested. And a baobab, if we take action too late, we can never get rid of it. It occupies the entire planet. It pierces it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabs are too numerous, they blow it up. " And then the classic drawing of the planet devoured by three huge baobabs appears.
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However, the opinion of the Little Prince is very minority, both among human beings who live with these great trees, for those who have immense symbolic power, and for naturalists. In Michel Ocelot's film Kirikú y la bruja , which recreates in cartoons an African folk tale with music by Youssou N'Dour, the town where the story begins appears protected by a huge baobab, with its huge and stubby trunk and its branches and leaves above all. Javier Fuertes Aguilar, biologist and titular scientist of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, shows his passion for these trees and ceibas (both belong to the Malvaceae family ). There is a species of baobab in continental Africa - it marks the arid landscape of the Senegalese or Tanzanian savannahs among many other countries -, six on the island of Madagascar and one in Australia. How did they get to Kimberley, in the northwest of the immense mainland island? It's a mystery.
"There are also many baobabs in India," explains Fuertes Aguilar, a tree sage. "They come directly from human connections, for example from the Portuguese who brought them from Mozambique," he says. “It is a tree that is part of the imagination of the continent. It is also a very resistant plant, which can withstand the lack of water very well and can live for hundreds, even thousands of years. ” Their American cousins, the kapok trees, are also huge and are also prepared for harsh dry months.
Both ceiba and baobabs are not only important for their beauty, for their antiquity (there are centuries-old and millennial specimens), they are especially important for the role they play in the community, which is lost in prehistory. A genetic study on the distribution of baobabs in Australia published in 2015 by a multidisciplinary scientific team showed that there is a relationship between different tree subspecies and Aboriginal language groups. This finding, added to paleobotany studies, lead to the conclusion that human groups contributed to the geographical distribution of these trees. But it is not necessary to go so far in time or space to seek that sacred relationship between trees and humans.
Francis Hallé, the great French researcher of tropical trees, tells in his book Allegation for the Tree (Libros del Jata): “All readers of The Little Prince know the baobabs and the dangers to which the sloth that allows them to invade is exposed Your planet. Undoubtedly, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is entitled to poetic license, but the botanist cannot help thinking that it is unfair to present the baobab as a dangerous tree, when it is characterized by an absolute lack of violence and multiple uses that deserve to be better known ”. "The very big and very old baobabs are often hollow and, as long as we make a door for them, we can get them to perform different functions: house, cellar, septic tank, tomb, ossuary, prison, church or meeting room!" I found
Its power as an element of cohesion in the community and its symbolic strength is repeated with other trees in many other cultures. "We have numerous equivalences in Spain and in Europe", explains the veteran Spanish naturalist Joaquín Araújo, who has just published Los calles que te taught en el bosque (Critic). For example the relationship between oaks and druids in the Celtic world. They have always been a meeting place: some of the most sacred pacts that have been made in this world have been under a tree. In the Mediterranean world, the olmas were in the town square and were centennial, social and friendly trees. Yew is another tree sacred to Central European cultures. "
The naturalist and writer Ignacio Molina has studied this relationship between trees and societies in his book Trees of the Board and Council (Jata Books): “When Humboldt was in what was then called Senegambia, he reports that he finds a meeting of the people of the town, a neighborhood board, inside a huge hollow baobab. It is a perfect image of the union between the country and the landscape, reflected by that totemic tree. There are many joint trees: elms, yews, oaks, which are present throughout the peninsula. Every time something important has to be done, they turn to them, the tree of parliament, of the party, of the dance. This has been lost, although some examples remain: the yew tree of San Miguel del Río in Asturias or, naturally, the Gernika tree, which have become a symbol of the Basque Country, not only of Vizcaya. The olma was the great goddess who was in the middle of the plaza, she was venerated by the neighbors. ” Molina uses the past because graphiosis, a fungus, has killed the vast majority of elms in Europe and has taken its totemic role in the town square (where the feminine was used above all to refer to the sacred tree).
The medievalist of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), Ana Rodríguez, also remembers "the tree in Runnymede under which Juan sin Tierra was forced by the English nobles to sign the Magna Carta in 1215", a tree that still lives in the bank of the Thames and that can be between 1,400 and 2,500 years old. “In 2015, that event was commemorated by installing a tree at the annual exhibition of the Royal Horticultural Society in London, sponsored by Amnesty International. Designed by Frederic Whyte, it celebrated the history of human rights. As explained in the installation, a solitary tree represents the yew tree under which the Magna Carta was signed at Runnymede in 1215. Five cypresses represent the texts that come from the Magna Carta: the Bill of Rights of 1689, the Abolition Act of Slavery (1833), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), described by Eleanor Roosvelt as the Magna Carta for all humanity, the European Convention on Human Rights (1955) and the England Human Rights Act of 1988 ” .
Despite the fact that trees continue to mark the landscape in large cities, landscape gardener and botanical researcher in works of art Eduardo Barba, who has recently published El jardin del Prado (Espasa), believes that “many societies have dissociated themselves from function social of the trees ”. “The tree as a vertebral point is maintained in those societies that have a closer contact with nature. These are trees that retain a protective mantle. In cultures that are closely linked to the earth, the tree continues to be a symbol of strength, freedom, and peace ”.
