Saruman in Madrid: the nonsense of killing trees

After spending the morning carefully cleaning the public toilets in Shibuya, a neighborhood in Tokyo, the protagonist of

Perfect Days

—Win Wenders' wonderful film about happiness and life—always sits down to eat something under some trees.

He is once accompanied by his niece, and when he discovers the way he observes the majestic plants, she asks him: “Are these trees your friends?”

There is no need for me to answer: naturally yes.

The presence of trees in an urban environment does not only have to do with protection against climate change - an essential factor, on the other hand - but with the very sense of humanity that these creatures transmit, which take decades and centuries to develop.

This is a fact that would be important to explain to the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and the mayor of the city, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, that between cutting trees by the sack to expand a metro line and cutting the traffic have chosen the first option, even in an area considered a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

The relationship of trees with humanity is almost as old as our culture, in the literal sense, because it begins with Genesis and the tree of good and evil and continues with

Homer's

Odyssey .

When Ulysses returns home, his father asks him for irrefutable proof that it is his son.

Then, the traveler, after decades of absence, describes his childhood through the trees that he gave him: “Let me tell you about the trees of this well-cultivated garden that you once gave me, and that I asked you every time when I was child, while I accompanied you.

We walked among them, and you named them to me one by one.

You gave me 13 pear trees and 10 apple trees and 40 fig trees” (version by Carlos García Gual in Alianza Editorial).

More information

The wisdom of trees, a new publishing phenomenon: the green shoots that grow in literature

One of the most impactful cultural news stories of last year was the felling by vandals of

Sycamore Gap

, a 300-year-old sycamore maple that had become the most photographed spot on Hadrian's Wall in northern England.

The neighbors were shocked.

Many shared their important celebrations with the tree: weddings, baptisms, birthdays, funerals... "They are memories that belong to generations and that have been destroyed," photographer Ian Sproat explained to the BBC.

For Anne Frank, the German girl whose diary has become a symbol of the Holocaust and who was murdered by the Nazis after spending more than two years hiding in an Amsterdam attic, hope was a chestnut tree that could be seen from her window.

“We looked at the blue sky, the leafless chestnut tree with its branches of resplendent droplets, the seagulls and other birds that when flying above our heads looked like silver.

And all this moved us and overwhelmed us so much that we could not speak," he wrote in his

Diary

on Wednesday, February 23, 1944. On Saturday, May 13, 1944, he noted: "The chestnut tree is in bloom from top to bottom and full of leaves, too. and it is much prettier than last year.”

The tree survived until 2010, when a storm toppled it.

But those responsible for the House Museum had been germinating chestnuts for years, which, turned into small trees, continue to be planted in schools and parks around the world.

Tolkien's drawing of 'The Elfking's Gate', an avenue of tall trees leading towards a bridge.Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, from its MS Tolkien Drawings collection

The stories of trees are endless —

The Baron Rampant,

by Italo Calvino;

the cabin from

Stand by Me,

by Stephen King;

The Cry of the Woods,

by Richards Powers;

From the Garden,

by Jerzy Kosinski;

The animated forest

,

by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez;

the entire filmography of Hayao Miyazaki, the creator of Studio Ghibli;

Asterix and Obelix;

the medieval stories of Robin of the Woods and the wizard Merlin...—because their history is deeply intertwined with that of human beings.

In a beautiful story,

The Caucasus Elm

, the Japanese cartoonist Jiro Taniguchi tells the story of a man who moves to a house that has a huge Caucasus elm — anyone who wants to know the species can see a beautiful one in the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid—, whose leaves bother the neighbors.

He intends to cut it down to avoid conflicts, but realizes that it is barbaric.

“The elm was already here before us,” he explains.

“To hate leaves is to forget that we are living with nature.

It is a presumptuous attitude.”

Trees—and their indiscriminate felling—also occupy a very important place in

The Lord of the Rings

.

JRR Tolkien adored nature and thought that its destruction also meant the annihilation of our species: in fact, the Shire is an idyllic and green place;

Rivendell, a beautiful forest;

while in Mordor, the lair of evil, there is no vegetation.

In his novels, the

ents

appear , living trees that move and walk, but desperately search for e

nts

women because they are condemned to extinction.

Sometimes they forget that they are alive and fall asleep and never move again.

They are a quiet species, who vegetate in their forest and do not want to get into trouble, until they discover what Saruman is doing with his family: cutting them down without mercy.

Barbol, the kind

ent

who helps the

hobits

, transforms into a fury of nature when he discovers that the evil wizard is destroying the forest.

If he takes a tour of Madrid from Middle Earth, it is possible that he will get quite angry again.

Here we have our own

sarunames

at work.

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