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The lords of the breeze

2020-12-26T02:01:57.867Z


Centennial dragon trees, a Polish forest reminiscent of Fangorn from 'The Lord of the Rings', and ginkgos that survived the Hiroshima bomb. Trees that encourage dreaming of travel


Trees are among the oldest living things on the planet.

The relationship we establish with them makes them almost more like animals than plants: because of the sounds they emit when the wind passes through them, because of the intensity with which they accompany us, because of their importance in the very survival of the planet, because of the role they play. forests occupy in our imagination.

But, in addition, the trees tell stories.

His life is so closely linked to that of humanity that they reflect our dreams and our wishes, but also what has happened to us throughout the centuries.

enlarge photo An elderly Bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) in the White Mountains of California.

Gerald Corsi Getty

The trees are full of hidden stories.

It is impressive, for example, when walking through Sarajevo and crossing a street to enter the Grbavica neighborhood, on the other side of the Miljacka River, and discover that, suddenly, the groves that line the streets are old.

Until that moment, there were only young specimens.

We have just crossed without knowing it - we will also look at the signs in Cyrillic shortly - from the former Muslim area, under siege during the Bosnian war (1992-1996), to the Serb, the besiegers.

In the first, its inhabitants had to cut all the wood they had on hand to warm themselves;

in the second, they didn't have to use anything to make a fire and survive the winter.

Trees are always part of the journey, but they can also be a destination in itself.

01 The ginkgos that survived the atomic bomb

Hiroshima is inevitably the city of the bomb.

"Exactly at eight fifteen minutes in the morning, on August 6, 1945, at the moment when the atomic bomb struck Hiroshima ...".

Thus begins the great classic of journalism

Hiroshima

, by John Hersey, a story of death and destruction, but also of survival after the explosion of the first atomic bomb used against human beings.

That resistance has one of its most powerful symbols on a

Ginkgo biloba

.

The trees that withstood the nuclear explosion have a name,

hibakujumoku

- from

hibaku

, affected by the bomb, and

jumoku

, tree -, but the best known of them is a ginkgo located in the Shukkeien garden of the Japanese city and which grew from again the spring after the explosion.

The ginkgo is an extraordinary creature, a reminder of prehistory, which was already growing on Earth 270 million years ago, but which became extinct in nature.

The curators of London's Kew Gardens, which house a specimen planted in 1762, define it as "the species that survived the dinosaurs."

It was preserved thanks to humans, especially in Japan and China for its sacred character, which it shares with many other trees.

There are many famous ginkgos in the world — in Madrid you can see magnificent specimens in the Parque del Oeste and the Royal Botanical Garden — but none surpass the one in Hiroshima.

Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman related in an article in

The New York Times

his visit to the Japanese city.

He recounts that a survivor of the bomb exhorted him: “You must see the

hibakujumoku

', he told me — he almost ordered me to.

'Must see ginkgos.'

Dorfman followed the advice and understood the story behind them: “The survival of these trees is a message of hope in the midst of the black rain of desolation: it is possible to nurture life and conserve it, but we must at the same time be suspicious of the forces that we ourselves have unleashed ”.

enlarge photo Dragon tree specimen in La Orotava (Tenerife).

Jan Wlodarczyk Alamy

02 Dragon blood in the Canary Islands

In the Canary Islands there is also another tree whose roots are lost in the mists of time: the dragon tree, an impressive century-old creature.

There are specimens in Morocco, Cape Verde and Madeira, and some cousins ​​as far away as the island of Socotra, in Yemen.

The dragon tree offers an unmistakable profile for the Spaniards who grew up with pesetas, because it appeared on thousand-dollar bills: a rough trunk and the crown looking up, seeking the light, like a reminder of the thick forests of prehistory.

The tree of those banknotes was the ancient dragon tree from Icod de los Vinos (Tenerife), which may actually be 700 years old.

The legend of the dragon tree, and its name, is due to the color of its sap, which turns red in contact with the air and has healing properties.

It is a tree known and revered since ancient times, whose powers also reach art.

In the book

Around the World in 80 Trees

, Jonathan Drori explains that Stradivarius used “dragon's blood”, the sap of Socotra dragon

trees

, to varnish his famous violins.

Eduardo Barba, in his precious book

El Jardin del Prado

, in which he catalogs the plants that appear in 1,050 works in the Madrid museum, describes the most famous dragon tree in the history of painting, the one that appears in

The Garden of Delights

, by Bosco.

The presence of this tree in this painting reflects the commercial and cultural exchanges in modern Europe.

"In the dragon tree that Bosch has painted it is possible to know even the number of blooms that the plant has had", writes Barba.

As with so many other trees, its symbolic power is as intense as its natural power.

enlarge photo Visitors in Redwood National Park, California (USA).

Jareya Nualthong Getty

03 Giants in California

Just as dragon trees have become a symbol of the Canary Islands, in many other places this identification between a totemic tree and the territory occurs.

The western United States is one of them.

There grows a long-lived pine named Methuselah, the oldest living uncloned organism in the world, almost 4,900 years old - the last mammoths lived 4,000 years ago - and whose location is kept secret.

Much younger, but also millennial, another Wild West species has become an icon of California and Oregon: the redwoods, which are among the largest living things on earth.

enlarge photo Forest of redwoods on Mount Cabezón, in Cantabria.

Zuasnabar Brebbia Getty Sunshine

However, its dizzying height and the immensity of its vast trunks have not managed to protect them from climate change, which in California maintains one of its most active fronts, with fires, storms and intense droughts.

One of the most famous redwoods in the world, known for the tunnel cut into the base of its trunk, which could even pass a car (a savage from bygone times), was knocked down by a storm in 2017. In the Sequoia National Park (California) you can see the elderly General Sherman, 2,200 years old.

In Spain there are huge specimens at the door of the gardens of La Granja de San Ildefonso (Segovia) and an evocative redwood forest in Cabezón de la Sal (Cantabria).

But they are by no means the only giants in the forest.

04 The venerable African baobabs

Nature offers few spectacles as beautiful as contemplating a baobab, a tree that divides between Africa and Australia and that is difficult to see outside its habitat because it requires a very warm climate.

There is one species of baobab in continental Africa - it marks the arid landscape of the savannas of Senegal or Tanzania, among other countries - six on the island of Madagascar and another in Australia.

But how did they get to Kimberley, northwest of the huge island continent?

It is a mystery, which shows that, in one way or another, trees manage to move around the world.

Their trunks are stubby and immense, with branches at the end.

enlarge photo Baobabs in the Tarangire National Park (Tanzania).

Marc Guitard Getty

Few trees have achieved such a universal literary representation, because they are responsible for

The Little Prince's

trip

to Earth, worried about getting a sheep that eats the shoots in time, since they would end up destroying his little planet with its roots.

The famous "Please draw me a sheep" is actually the search for a remedy against baobabs.

However, on earth, they get along very well with humans.

In Senegal they are part of everyday life: in the beautiful and ramshackle Saint Louis, in the north of the country, their branches and their fruits appear on the other side of the walls of the patios.

As Francis Hallé, the great French researcher on tropical trees, explains in his book

Argument for the tree

, their social function is very deep: “The very large and very old baobabs are often hollow and, as long as we make a door for them, we can get them to perform various functions: house, cellar, septic tank, tomb, ossuary, prison, church or meeting room! ”.

05 Sacred Olmas in Castile

Like the baobabs in Africa, many trees play a central role in the lives of people and citizens.

For centuries, in Spain, and especially in Castile, the squares were presided over by a centenary olma, which marked the place where important meetings were held.

Ignacio Abella, naturalist and writer, recounts his

social role

in his book,

Junction Trees and Council

: “There are many junction trees: elms, yews, oaks, which are present throughout the Peninsula.

Every time you have to do something important, you turn to them, the tree of parliament, the party, the dance.

That has been lost, although there is still an example: the yew tree from Bermiego, in Asturias, or, naturally, the tree from Gernika.

The olma was the great goddess who was in the middle of the square, she was venerated by the neighbors ”.

However, a fungus, grafiosis, killed a large part of the elms of Europe and left a huge hole in the Castilian collective imagination.

But the veneration of trees continued through, for example, Asturian yew trees;

the aforementioned one from Bermiego or those from Santa Eulalia de Abamia - it is a strange tree, because it is believed to have a connection with the other world.

In the province of Segovia, at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama, lives a very revered specimen: the Juniper of Sigueruelo, which is between 400 and 500 years old.

Its 3 feet and 15 meters high keep the memory of Castilla.

06 A landscape created by the Romans

Many other species have become guardians of the territory, in memories of its past.

The history of the Mediterranean, for example, can be told through nature.

Helena Attlee wrote a wonderful book on the history of citrus,

The Country Where the Lemon Blossom

.

Through them he traced a cultural account of Italy, from the lemons of Amalfi to the blood oranges that are gathered in the shadow of Etna, in Sicily.

One of the most beautiful parks in Rome is the Garden of Orange Trees (Savello is its official name), on the Aventine Hill, from where there is a beautiful view of Trastevere and the historic city center, with the dome of San Pedro in the background.

There the orange trees share the space with the pines, two of the symbolic trees of the Mediterranean landscape.

Together with the olive tree, they are the great trees of the

Mare Nostrum

.

Like the orange trees, the centenary olive trees are the result of a long history of mixtures, influences and travels, and also, like those, they represent a way of life, for agriculture, but also for gastronomy.

In her book

SPQR

, Mary Beard explains the power of ancient Rome through the monoculture of the olive (and oil), since it was the legions who imposed it.

“The landscape of southern Spain is undoubtedly Roman.

The monoculture of olive trees began then.

For Rome, Spain was olive groves and mines ”, he explained in an interview.

In the Mediterranean cultural imagination, the fig tree also occupies a central place: because of its smell in summer and because it produces two different fruits.

The great writer Patrick Leigh Fermor said that in his adopted land, the Mani peninsula, in the Greek Peloponnese, it was advised not to sleep under a fig tree because it would cause heavy dreams.

It is one of the many trees that offer a door to other worlds.

07 The kingdom of threatened trees

Nowhere on the planet does the forest mass occupy such an imposing space as in the jungles.

The tallest tree in the world grows there: a red angelim that measures 88 meters, surrounded by other giants of the same species in Amapá, northeast Brazil.

Nowhere else are they so threatened by economic exploitation: in the vast Amazon rainforest, the numbers are staggering.

This newspaper recently told from Brazil that in this country the Amazon has lost in one year “11,088 square kilometers of trees;

that is, 626 million copies, 1.58 million soccer fields, 3 fields felled per minute ”.

It is not only a threat to the beings that have woven their lives in this natural space - among them, many of the last uncontacted tribes of the world - but it constitutes a danger to humanity.

The history of Europe, for example, could be told through the disappeared forests, which marked the territory and the imaginary of the old continent practically until the 19th century, when they began to be cut down harshly to produce coal during the industrial revolution.

One of Europe's last primeval forests, Poland's Bialowieza, a biosphere reserve and a world heritage site, is also in danger from massive logging and climate change.

Home to the last European bison in the wild, it is a reminder of what Europe was like 9,000 years ago.

Its oaks and firs represent a time when trees were free.

08 From A Coruña to the Antipodes

Echoes of the imagination of JRR Tolkien and his Fangorn Forest from

The Lord of the Rings

echo in the thickness of Bialowieza

.

In it the Ents lived, trees that could walk, a power that they lost when they fell asleep.

However, beyond Middle-earth, it is evident that the trees move in strange ways.

We have seen the mystery of the boababs of Australia, but there is another enigma related to the Antipodes as well.

Europeans did not arrive in New Zealand until the 17th century.

However, in the courtyard of the A Coruña Local Police station grows a meter-ledge or

pohutukawa

, whose age is impossible to calculate, although due to its diameter and height it may be up to 500 years old.

The problem is that it is an endemic tree to New Zealand: it does not grow anywhere else in the world.

What are you doing there?

Did Spanish explorers arrive on the islands long before the Dutch and British as some historians claim?

The paths of the trees are endless.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-12-26

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