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TREES OF POWER
With an ancient history, trees are one of the firm hubs of material and
spiritual life for many cultures. Nowadays they still constitute a
great source of knowledge for those who understand their value and feel
their energy. My Forest’s Library, which was begun in 1985 and is made
up today of 1055 box-books, has been constructed around this hub,
always from the starting point of personal experiences, although it
includes many other organic and inorganic forms. The death of the
copper beech (Fagus sylvatica var. Purpurea) in the Flower Garden of
the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano is the reason for this exhibition, which
contemplates my relation with arboreal individuals of particular
relevance due to their antiquity, their legendary character, their role
in my vital and artistic environment. My devotion towards them. They
are trees that have been lived and dreamed and whose existence is
immortalized in my Library. Together they constitute a forest of
impressive presences. Homage, protection and renewal have been the more
frequent dialogue forms with them.
The
archaeological findings, the Natural History museums and the
prehistoric species still alive today reveal the wisdom with which
trees have confronted geological and climatic adversities. Some species
last longer than others, but there have always existed individuals with
a special endurance to time, venerated because of their antiquity. When
their life ends due to natural causes, we have to admit the justice of
vital cycles and admire the power still held by the fallen tree. But
trees, beyond their sustainable exploitation for the obtainment of
wood, suffer man´s threat. Nature’s excellence has given us trees and
our duty is to preserve them. Instead, we witness how great forest
areas are depleted and, at a more local level, how trees in streets and
parks are treated with contempt. The copper beech of the Flower Garden,
more than a hundred years old, dried up for several reasons, among them
the building repairs of the palace and a dire “landscape” work, which
cut off part of the secondary roots. The dismay of the employees of the
Fundación Lázaro Galdiano and of all those who knew and loved this
magnificent specimen was great. The possibilities of saving the tree
were studied, but found unfeasible. The Dirección General de Bellas
Artes of the Ministerio de Cultura, together with the Fundación, then
resolved to put me in charge of an artistic project for somehow keeping
the presence of the tree alive. The first thing I did was to have an
audience with the beech, which took place on December, the 7th, 2007,
so as to communicate with its power, to feel it and interpret it. I
also visited the other specimen of centenarian beech in Madrid, which
lives magnificently in the Royal Botanical Gardens. And I undertook an
expedition to the Beech wood of Montejo, frozen. After this conclave of
beeches, the communication code we chose was moist silence, lightness
and transparency. The project, the rebirth of the beech, will be
luminous shadow and ice, light and frosted glass.
Just
like a tree can never be observed from a sole point of view, the
memorial of the beech was to have various perspectives, expressed by
different means, visible from different places and with diverse day and
night light conditions. Therefore, three interventions in the garden
subtly evoke the now ghostly presence of the tree. The first one is the
projection of the silhouette of the dry beech on the museum’s turret.
At dawn, the luminous shadow of the absent tree begins to emerge on the
building’s façade that faces the garden, centred on the turret. A
potent floodlight has been installed, which shows not the shadow, but
the negative of the shadow, that is, a figure of light. The second
intervention has fixed by acid etching on the great window of the shop
the part of the tree’s image one could see from the inside through this
window – approximately from the centre of the room. This type of work
is linked to the important collection of glass and crystal objects in
the museum. The third one, of which I am only promoter and witness,
closes the vital cycle with the planting of a new copper beech brought,
like the dead one, from Navarra, the birthplace of Lázaro Galdiano.
The project is completed by the realization of two box-books of the
Forest’s Library with material from the beech: One with the last leaves
and one with its inner wood. And with the exhibition Árbol caído
(‘Fallen Tree’) in the exhibition room of the Fundación Lázaro
Galdiano, a nocturnal path by the ancient or fallen trees I have known
and lived. Box-books which contain fragments of these trees and their
experiences. Their journey to the Beyond.
I have divided the exhibition in different sections, reuniting trees classified in diverse categories.
Stone Trees
They
are the fascinating fossil trees, fallen and eternized by petrifaction.
In April, 2007, the oldest tree known today, 385 million years old, was
discovered. It lived at a time when not even dinosaurs had appeared on
earth, much less man. Its only companions were arthropods. It is a
specimen of Wattieza cladoxylopsid from the Devonian, a type of
arborescent fern found in the county of Schoharie, New York State. It
is almost nine meters high and, exceptionally, it still has branches
and roots; it was still standing when it was covered by sediments and
afterwards fossilized. Equally impressive are the petrified forests in
the northeast of the province of Santa Cruz, in the Argentinean
Patagonia, which are younger – approximately 130 million years old –
and therefore more evolved trees, similar to araucarias. At the
beginning of the Cretaceous, volcanic eruptions buried these trees with
ashes, and some trunks remained standing, nowadays forming great fossil
groups.
In
Spain we have a fossil tree site near the village of Hacinas, in the
Sierra de la Demanda, of the same antiquity as the Patagonian one. In
those times, Burgos enjoyed a hot and humid tropical climate that
allowed the development of a dense jungle with a variety of conifers of
the family of the Podocarpaceous, which could reach a height of up to
80 meters.
For many years I have been interested in the fragments of fossil trunks
and branches that trap the infinite age of trees, and I have reunited a
small collection of them. I have used them in some books, like Nr. 312,
Astillas de un bosque petrificado en Albacete (‘Splinters of a
Petrified Forest in Albacete’), or Nr. 779, Tremor en el castaño de El
Tiemblo (‘Quaver in the Chestnut Tree of El Tiemblo’), where I included
two slices of petrified wood from Madagascar, 80 million years old,
with some chestnuts of the centenarian “El Abuelo”.
Mystical, Legendary and Prophetic Trees
The
tree is a universal symbol. A fountain of wisdom, it has a prominent
role in the ceremonies of many cultures and religions and plays a part
in numerous mythical narratives. It participates in different
cosmogonies, in the founding history of cities, in revelations, in
historic or imaginary epic poems. Trees that existed or not, but that
are alive in memory; examples of surprising perpetuity, because of
their association with archaeological remains or because of the care
with which many generations kept the sprouts of these venerable
specimens alive.
One
of the most famous trees is the Pipal, or Boddhi tree, under which
Siddhartha Gautama was transformed into a Buddha when reaching
enlightenment, in Boddhgaya, Bihar State, India. In the place it grew
now lives a descendant of it, with six of whose leaves I created Book
Nr. 740, Ficus religiosa, the scientific name of this type of fig tree.
Tradition reports that after enlightenment Buddha remained one whole
week sitting in meditation in the same place; the second week he
meditated walking and the third one he spent contemplating the Pipal.
The tree survived for centuries and has many descendants in India and
other Buddhist countries: The one that flourishes in the Mahavira
Monastery of Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, is especially revered.
Trees
have also played a capital role in desert countries, like Egypt.
Hatshepsut tried to justify the usurpation that raised her to power and
to win the favour of Ammon’s priests by offering them frankincense, a
resin, which constituted an indispensable ritual substance. She
organized a great sea expedition to Punt to take the incense tree
(Boswellia sacra) to Egypt, sending five great ships of splendid
Lebanon cedars, with 9 meter high masts. She considered this journey
the culmination of her reign, and so it was reflected in the exquisite
reliefs of her funerary temple in Deir el-Bahari, of great ethnographic
and botanical interest. The temple was surrounded by ponds and gardens
and there still remain the stumps of the old trees planted by the
queen. From them I removed some splinters, preserved in Book Nr.
1028, El árbol del incienso de Hatsheput (‘The Incense Tree of
Hatshepsut’).
Religious
sites not only included trees in their gardens, but reached their
traditional architectonical forms by development of the vegetal
constructions where ancestral ceremonies were performed. Thus, for
instance, in the funerary complex of Zoser, in Saqqara, the architect
Imhotep imitated the trunks of palm trees or papyrus in the ribbed
columns. Two old wood trunks protrude from the Eastern façade of the
step pyramid, whose hot stones I climbed to obtain three splinters,
kept in Book Nr. 1027, Árbol interior Saqqara (‘Inner Tree Saqqara’).
The
incense trees of Hatshepsut were taken to Karnak, but they are not the
only ones that grew and grow in the most sacred site of Egypt. In the
northern section, far from the turmoil of the visitors, one of the
three chapels of the Ptah temple is dedicated to the goddess Hathor,
who lives there as one of her manifestations, the solar lioness
Sekhemet; it is an imposing black granite statue immersed in darkness,
illuminated from above by the sunset light of Thebes. At the door of
this temple grows a sycamore, which was the tree associated with
Hathor: One of her titles was “Lady of the Sycamore”. It is very
possible that this tree, from which I took the dripping figs and small
branches that can be seen in Book Nr. 1035, Sicomoro Sejemet (‘Sejemet
Sycamore’), could be a descendant of the ones that probably surrounded
the construction in times of the pharaohs. The sycamore, on the other
hand, was a much appreciated species by the Egyptians because its wood
was the best for sarcophagi, conferring the death eternal life. The
Book of the Death expresses it as follows: “I have embraced the
sycamore and the sycamore has protected me; the doors of Duat have been
opened for me.” On top of that, the fibres were used to weave amulet
cords for the living and the death.
Mysticism
and trees often go together. At the highest point of Segovia’s
monastery of Discalced Carmelites stands the skeleton of a cypress –
another funerary tree – planted there by Saint John of the Cross in the
XVI century. Splinters of its dry wood, taken at the light of dawn
reflected by the river Eresma, inflamed water and splinters from the
shoots of its roots are collected in Book Nr. 1047, Ciprés de San Juan
de la Cruz (‘Cypress of Saint John of the Cross’). Saint John planted
another cypress, still alive, in the Carmen de los Mártires, Granada,
under whose shadow he wrote Dark Night of the Soul. The botanical lack
of definition of the trees planted by the saint is curious. The one in
Granada is traditionally known as “the Cedar of Saint John of the
Cross”, and the one in Segovia would be, in words of the guardian of
the high chapel, a juniper-cypress (?) of incorruptible wood.
The
cypress is a symbol of longevity, and in ancient China its seeds were
consumed to attain it; it was also affirmed that if one rubbed one’s
heels with its resin, one could walk on the sea. The oldest cypress of
the city of Granada, 600 years of age and dried up by now, is in a
courtyard of Generalife, to which it gives name: It is the “Cypress of
the Sultana”, paradigm of a tree category that propitiates secret
meetings. Under this cypress, so the legend goes, Boabdil’s wife met
her lover; the vengeance the king took on all the members of the
traitor’s family is one of the most beautiful legends of the Alhambra.
The legend says that the cypress was killed by lightning, and it is
remembered in Book Nr. 1052.
Trees and shamanism also go hand in hand. In Book Nr. 392, Raíz del
Nagual (‘The Nagual’s Root), whose box contains fragments of an ancient
walnut tree knocked down by the wind, I remember the animal spirit,
vehicle of the gods, which gives power to the shamans and which, in the
Toltec tradition, is the projection each being possesses since birth,
that protects and guides him. Nagualism affirms that trees are nearer
to man than ants. Trees and human beings share emanations. The old
seers developed witchcraft techniques to trap the conscience of trees,
using them as guides to enter the deepest levels. The walnut tree is my
nagual. In the branch contained in the book I pierced a trapezoidal
form similar to the ones I have seen in ancient representations of
Mexican shamans.
At
the principal entrance of Sonora’s market, specialized in healing
plants and sorcery, I obtained some strange fragments of dark striped
wood they sold to me as “viper tree”, a remedy for infections and
fungus. I have classified the book I created with them, Nr. 794, in the
group of mythical trees, because I haven’t been able to identify this
healing or magic species. I only found a study about healers of
Veracruz, where a “viper tree” is described as Erythrina Americana. As
far as I know, it doesn’t correspond with the splinters I have.
Involuntarily, I have shared the mystery with people who have seen a
reproduction of my book in some catalogue and I have been questioned
about it, but wasn’t able to answer.
In
Mexico, trees are in the origin of the founding of cities. Tenochtitlan
(nowadays Mexico City) was constructed in the site indicated by the
legendary eagle, which, after hundreds of years of pilgrimage, alighted
on a nopal to devour a serpent in the year 1325. I dedicated Book Nr.
799, La gran Tenochtitlán (‘Great Tenochtitlan’), with fragments of
nopal root from Zacatecas, to this episode (not included in the
exhibition). The nopal is not really a tree, but belongs to the
cactus family – although the old specimens lose their lower leaves and
grow from a ligneous stem – and its capacity for renovation turns it
into a symbol of immortality. A tree is the great mesquite (from the
Nahuatl mizquitl) that grows near the Templo de Santa María Magdalena
in Tequisquiapan. History tells that the founding mass of the city was
celebrated under it in 1551; but the community existed before and there
is a legend, probably inspired in the old one of Mexico City, that
another founding eagle alighted on the mesquite in Pre-Hispanic times;
the husks of its seeds are in Book Nr. 921, Mesquite, árbol fundador de
Tequisquiapán (‘Mesquite, Founding Tree of Tequisquiapan’). As the
nopal, the mesquite seems eternal because, even if it is cut down, it
sprouts again from any root fragments that remain buried.
My
life has been united to trees, which I have considered as my equals,
and in them I have seen my destiny. Book Nr. 1000, Trombiosis, marked a
millennium crisis, with a presage of death. In Quintanar de la Sierra,
near the necropolis of Cuyacabras, I found a knot of ancient oak,
engraved with some slits that prefigured the alternative path blood had
to create in my right arm after suffering a thrombosis.
Witnesses of History
The
tree to which I have dedicated more box-books is the Pino de las Tres
Cruces (‘Pine of the Three Crosses’) that already existed in the Valle
de Cuelgamuros when Rubens and Velázquez visited El Escorial in 1628;
it appeared in a painting of the Monastery that burned down. For
centuries it constituted a geographic landmark – it determined the
border of the territories of San Lorenzo del Escorial, Peguerinos and
Guadarrama. It was a lookout tree, a legendary site and a reference for
travellers. The winds and the passage of time finally knocked it down
in 1991, when it was almost 500 years of age. I witnessed its felling,
the planting of three Pinus nigra in substitution and I created several
books with pieces of its wood – symbolic acts in defence of the
landscape -, three of which were purchased by the cited town halls in
the first institutional act of homage to a fallen tree collected in my
Forest’s Library, and a precedent of this rebirth of the copper beech
in the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano. In the exhibition, the Pino de las
Tres Cruces appears in Book Nr. 438, that contains a piece of its
ligneous heart.
Many
villages have their emblematic tree, the great specimen that presides
over civic life or that is associated to the historic or religious
event that most marked the place. Many town squares were presided by a
great elm tree. Graphiosis, as we will see, killed almost all of them,
including the famous «Olma de Rascafría», which was finally knocked
down by the weight of the snow in the year 2000. In Book Nr. 776, I
remember the long fight of the tree against the snow. It had, as the
Pino de las Tres Cruces, almost five centuries of age and it is said
that it was the refuge of the bandit «El Tuerto Pirón» in the XIX
century. It wouldn’t have been difficult to take refuge under it, as
the process that the selfsame Agencia del Medio Ambiente chose to
preserve the dead tree – completing its natural cavity and lyophilizing
it – allows to see its ample inner space.
The
tree of Guernica has civic and political significance. Under it, the
Lord of Biscay first and the Castilian Kings afterwards swore to
respect the Biscayan codes of laws. Nowadays, the Lehendakari swears
there to fulfil his post. The same history, but four specimens in a
lineage that begins in the XIV century with the «father tree», that
lived until 1742; in its place they planted the «old tree», which
survived until 1860 and was substituted by the «son tree», that died in
2004 and was replaced by one of its sprouts. Before it was felled down,
I collected some twigs broken by the wind, which form part of Book Nr.
924. The Oak of Guernica, witness of a city’s drama and symbol of the
Basque people, also constitutes an example of respect for arboreal life
and of the human assistance in the survival of some specimens.
There
are tree lineages in the same way that there are human lineages, an
idea developed in the «path of the royal oaks» of Bialowieza, the
frontier between Poland and Byelorussia. They are oaks of approximately
50 metres of height, which bear the names of the most famous kings of
Poland and Lithuania, who at an early time protected the site as a
hunting reserve, propitiating so its conservation as the only area of
original Atlantic forest still existing in Europe. These oaks are
contemporary of the monarchs that hunted there in the XVI century and
are the true kings of the wood. Book Nr. 938 is made with their barks.
Death by Natural Causes
I have mentioned the cases of some trees that
succumbed to the forces of nature in the mountains. But it also happens
in the city. Madrid’s Botanical Gardens, a refuge for many tree species
of great value, lamented the death by natural causes of one of its
symbols: The hackberry named «El abuelo» (‘The Grandfather’), to which
I paid homage in Book Nr. 454, Almez, silencio lejano (‘Hackberry,
Distant Silence’). Some xylographic fungi taken from its bark appear in
another lament for a fallen tree, an Arizona cypress knocked down by
the wind in Madrid’s Plaza de Linneo: Book Nr. 1024, Las raíces de
Linneo (‘Linneo’s Roots’). Halfway between the city and the fields is
the beautiful park of El Capricho, where Goya walked, inhabited by some
of Madrid’s most majestic pines. One of them fell in 2004, and I
dedicated Book Nr. 909 to him. In this book I remember the dryads, or
spirits of the trees, whose voices merge with the murmur of the leaves.
They
are isolated cases, in comparison with the catastrophic snowstorm that
pounded upon the Sierra de Guadarrama in January 1996, from the 20th to
the 22nd. The gale broke, knocked down and uprooted pines by the
thousands. On this occasion I studied the forms derived from the power
of the wind: Auras, signs drawn on the air. Volatile emanations or
sounds liberated by the trees, which I captured in books like Nr. 648,
Ventus increbescit, that was part of the exhibition El vendaval libera
las auras (‘The Gale Liberates The Auras’).
Not
only wind and snow are capable of knocking down trees. The slow death
by strangulation is another death-cause. The force of vines can be
appreciated in Book Nr. 965, Palo de tres costillas (‘Stick of Three
Ribs’), which I got at the ex-convent of Tepoztlán, and which, like the
protagonist species, that steals life from the tree, has a destiny
united to theft.
Survivors
But sometimes not even natural forces are able to
prevail over the firmness of the tree that clings to life, defying
time. Several places on Earth claim to be the birthplace of Metusalem.
In Dalarna, to the northwest of Sweden, lives a Picea abies, or Norway
spruce, of 9 950 years, that has reached such a fabulous age because it
constantly renovates its trunk, cloning from the root and adapting to
the climate of each era. The Lagarostrobos franklinii, or Huon Pine
fount at Mount Read, Tasmania, could be older still, with a probable
age of 10 500 years. It is another case of biological intelligence: It
is a group of trees made up of genetically identical males that
reproduce vegetatively. None of the trees by itself is so old, but
together they form a single organism that would be this age.
Although
the most surprising example of survival is probably the gingko of
Hiroshima, which grew in the gardens of a Buddhist temple one kilometre
from the place where the first atomic bomb fell. It was the only
surviving tree of the city, and blossomed the year afterwards without
any problem. Gingko biloba is a unique species, very ancient, that can
reach 1000 years of age. It is considered a living fossil and it could
survive the radiation because it acquired great resistance to oxidation
many millions of years ago, when the atmosphere had a greater content
in oxygen than today.
Survival
beyond what is to be expected not only happens to paleontological
species. In every ancient forest it is not rare to find some ancient
exemplars. Almost hollow, apparently fragile, they still grow leaves.
Among the ones I have known is the oak of Estalaya, in Palencia,
standing up in spite of the wounds left by thunderbolts (Book Nr. 968)
or many Asturian chestnuts, whose hollows are treated with fire to
prevent decomposition (Book Nr. 1006). Chestnuts, on the other hand,
belong to the group of nutrient trees, which have always fed the
inhabitants of the north of Spain. Maybe this is the reason they were
especially cared for and could reach such an advanced age.
Fellings
Trees give us food and provide wood. In the many fellings carried out
to obtain it, sometimes thousand of trees are cut down. We are almost
never conscious that we are surrounded by dead trees in the form of
furniture, objects made of plywood or paper. In Book Nr. 630, Cortezas
incensadas (‘Incensed Barks’) I made an offering to all those anonymous
pines, sacrificed as in a great hecatomb for our own profit.
In
many places and at different points in history, this exploitation
reaches a predatory character. One outstanding case is that of the
logwood (Haematoxylon campechianum) of the Yucatan peninsula that
constituted the reason for a long conflict between Spaniards and
British. A dyeing tree (it gives an attractive bluish black), it was
needed by the European textile industry, and Spain tried to corner the
market. But the pirates that got out of work after the Treaty of Madrid
in 1667 and went to live to the Caribbean discovered the income-yield
capacity of felling these trees in less controlled areas and
transformed themselves into felling pirates, with headquarters in
Belice and with the approval of the English Crown. Needless to say, the
activity of the Spaniards was as harmful as that of the contrabandists.
Trees
are also cut down to make space for other crops or for plantations of
fast growing trees, like eucalyptus. The world worries because of the
deforestation of the Amazonian rainforest, but recently attention has
turned to the accelerated disappearance of the forests in the Tasmanian
Florentine Valley, where the 90 meters high Eucalyptus regnans and the
prehistoric tree ferns, both part of the decimated ancient austral
forest, are being destroyed to plant genetically engineered eucalyptus
trees, to exploit the wood pulp. Nearer to us, in Galicia, the native
forests have long since been cornered by plantations of eucalyptus
trees, born to die fast and harmful for territories other than their
original one. To one of them, the Eucalipto marcado en Boaventura
(‘Eucalyptus marked in Boaventura’, Book Nr. 758), already dead for
sure, I related my most vivid dreams and I drew on him a protective
sign.
The Menace
Advanced cultures care for trees, because they value their beauty and
utility. A respect that is instilled since ancient times. We find an
example in the punishments described in Indian literature for those
that attempted against them. People had to pay high fines if they cut
down trees by roadways and fountains or if they uprooted herbs without
good reason. Karma Purana indicates the penance for expiating the guilt
of those that cut a tree, vine, bush or any type of plant. In the Agni
Purana bodily punishment is decreed for felling shady trees like the
Banyan or the Mango tree. The Vayu Purana affirms that the massive
felling of trees causes natural disasters.
We
are upset by deforestation, but we should grieve as much for the crimes
committed against trees in urban environments. In front of Berlin’s
Museum of Natural History there is an enormous group of copper beeches
that still have their whole crown. They are a paradigm of an attitude
of respect and admiration towards trees from the part of a city. Madrid
despises and mutilates trees with treacherous fellings and murderous
pruning. With this tree-killing spirit that is so Spanish.
One
of the tree’s greatest enemies is construction. We all know the menace
that threatens the plantains of the Paseo del Prado, because in the
city-planning project it had not been considered that these trees
should be untouchable. I included their barks, affected by pollution,
in Book Nr. 998, Lo que sienten los plátanos del Paseo del Prado (‘What
Paseo del Prado’s Plantains Feel’). Also in smaller constructions the
first to die are the trees, sometimes of great size. In many small and
middle sized houses there were fig-trees in the inner courtyard. One of
them lived in Calle Málaga, and before it was uprooted by the
excavator, I took materials for some drawings and Book Nr. 673. In the
neighbourhood of Pinar del Rey, gardens are sacrificed to gain
constructed area and, just a few meters from my study, the former
beautiful tree nursery of Bourgignon, a meadow of leafy moisture, has
sold itself to the pressure of bricks and has lost – or will lose,
because of damage to the roots – great specimens. It is just one of the
thousands of examples of trees that died in private gardens with the
compliance of the higher instances.
Rituals of Growth, Conservation and Protection
When a tree or a forest in my environment, with which I have a habitual
relationship, is endangered or has suffered some misfortune, I take
action by means of plastic spells to propitiate its recovery. Normally
they are not rites realized in the territory, but in my boxes. The
first example of this practice in my Forest’s Library is Book Nr. 228,
Cómo provocar el crecimiento del cedro cortado en Villa Ródenas (‘How
to Provoke the Growth of the Cedar Tree Cut Down in Villa Rodenas’), a
garden in Cercedilla. To daily pass the trees establishes a bond, whose
rupture creates suffering. Sometime later a small nut tree fell at the
door of my mountain study, for which I officiated an interment in Book
Nr. 368.
Sometimes
the species battle vainly against illnesses and plagues that are not
tackled with sufficient energy by the environmental authorities. The
already mentioned graphiosis lowered the population of Iberian elms
between 80 and 90% in the 80ties, and the few survivors are pampered to
delay their death and obtain a genetic bank for their recuperation. The
illness is produced by the fungus Ceratocystis ulmi, of a
semi-parasitic character, transmitted by a bark beetle. Book Nr. 251,
La leyenda del olmo pez (‘The Legend of the Fish Elm’), contains a bark
piece of a great elm attacked by graphiosis, which disappeared near the
train station of Cercedilla.
Another
beetle, the Cerambyx cerdo or great Capricorn, is producing devastating
damage in the oak groves south and west of the Iberian Peninsula. This
oak groves are highly weakened by the drought and the bad pruning made
in the past. It is very difficult to cure, because the big larva lives
for two years inside the oak, drilling and pulverizing the wood and
turning the oak very vulnerable to the growing drought and to strong
winds, which break their trunks with enormous facility. I have seen the
problem in the Alcudia Valley, Ciudad Real, and I have created some
books where I symbolically protect the oaks, incrusting white quartz
fragments from Monterrubio, La Serena, Badajoz, in the galleries
devoured by the larvae (Book Nr. 830) or inserting transatlantic
selenite pieces between barks (Book Nr. 995). In Book Nr. 954 there are
Cúpulas sinfónicas de encinas (‘Symphonic Oak Cupolas’), collectors of
menacing sounds, which navigated the banks of the Ganges and were
deposited on the sand of the Marikarnika crematory in Veranesi. This
musical spell is also related to the coded, secret language contained
in the oak charcoal.
There
are other endangered species. The Pinus insignis of Cantabria suffers
the so called «pine cancer», caused by another fungus, the Fusarium
circinatum, proceeding from the United States. But, in the end, the
greatest enemy of the pines is the human being, and to defend them from
him I drew defence lines with sulphur in Book Nr. 412. In much the same
way I spread wale sperm among the beeches of Alkiza, Guipuzcoa, to
contribute to their fertility and preservation in Book Nr. 923.
Salvations
Three centuries ago, in Rajasthan, India, Amrita Devi led a group of
three hundred women, who sacrificed their lives embracing trees to save
them from being felled. Their spirit is still alive in the Chipko
movement (the word means «to embrace»), initiated in 1972 by two
followers of Gandhi and the women of Gashwal (Uttar Pradesh) with the
same goal. They also embrace trees to save them.
The
conservationist zeal is based on the love of trees and has had great
champions throughout history. I particularly admire John Muir, who
promoted the protection of Yosemite Valley and other areas, and is one
of the fathers of Ecologism. I remember him in Book Nr. 387, Claustro
para un nudo de pino rojo (‘Cloister for a Red Pine Knot’) that
contains a piece of Sequoya sempervirens of Muir Forest, Mill Valley.
Less
famous is the case of the protection of the Fontainebleau Forest by the
artists. The original cause for its conservation was its status as hunt
reserve propriety of the kings, inalienable from the XVI century
onwards. New trees were planted in 1682, 1720 and 1802 to make it
more luxuriant. Between 1831 and 1848 it was reforested intensively
with wild pines, an action which was opposed by the painters of the
Barbizon School, which considered the place their Arcadia. In 1837 they
managed to revoke the felling of the oldest trees and to avoid pines in
their favourite places. Thanks to this sensibility, 624 hectares of
ancient forest were protected in 1853, and in 1861 more than a thousand
hectares were put under protection in the world’s first environmental
protection statute. The statute of Yellowstone Park dates from the year
1872.
I
would also like to pay homage to Aldo Leopold, forestry expert and
conservation forerunner of the United States, who devoted himself to
pine reforestation in the family farm of Shacq. He died the 11th of
April of 1948, of a heart attack, while trying to put out a fire in a
neighbour’s farm, which threatened his plantations. His most important
work is A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, shortly after his
death, where environmental ethics is founded as a philosophic
discipline.
My
endeavours at the conservation field have been more secretive rescue
missions. Book Nr. 523, Sacrificio (‘Sacrifice’), forms part of a
series about the saving from felling of an important pine group in my
Fuenfría Valley forests. In winter 1992, a felling numeration was
marked there by the traditional method of removing a piece of bark and
writing a number in the trees that are to be felled. The trees were 991
pines in Los Helechos, a deep and sombre forest area, almost untouched.
I decided to save the pines that I thought should continue living
because of their antiquity, majesty, form and rareness. To this end, I
hid the cut done on the tree to write the number. I took away the
number of a pine of great growth or beauty and passed it to a smaller
one. This disoriented the forestry workers, which could not decide
themselves to begin with the work. As I was not sure of the efficacy of
this method, I addressed the responsible authority of the Environmental
Agency, Juan Vielva, asking for the salvation of twelve pines, which
were erased from the list. Finally I was able to avoid the whole
felling.
In
Madrid, some of us who live in the area of Pinar del Rey, one of the
few remaining forests of wild pine trees, with more of two hundred
years of age, had to demonstrate our opposition to its partial felling
to open up a subway station and managed to stop the project. The pine
grove is located at the highest point of the city and owes its name to
the fact that King Alfonso XII used to walk there (and Franco used to
hunt). I erased the red marks that indicated the pines that were to be
felled and I realized protective diagrams with the pine nuts in two
books; one of them is number 790. Both were shown later at a Spanish
Art exhibition in the Senate palace. They spoke there. In this same
pine grove I picked up a small pine that grew from the nut of a felled
pine, which I included in the box of Book Nr. 1014, Pinos y susurros
(‘Pines and Murmures’), as a testimony of hope for the conservation of
this natural space.
***
Trees
always loose against man. Victor Hugo already said that it is very sad
to think that nature speaks while humankind does not listen. But there
is the hope that the change of mentalities and the scientific advances
will help us to take good care of nature. In the future maybe it will
be normal to clone great specimens or historical trees; it is already
being done in New York with a European beech of one hundred years of
age that grows in Cherry Hill, inside Central Park. Who knows what
space investigation will bring in botanical themes, but we already have
«moon trees», which grew from seeds transported to the Moon in Apollo
XIV. Maybe we will take seeds from the Earth to the Moon. In Norway
they have created a global seed chamber near Longyearby in the heart of
an Arctic frozen mountain, to preserve all the seed types of the world.
Miguel
de Unamuno wrote: «There were trees before there were books and maybe
when books end, trees will go on. And maybe humankind will reach such a
culture level that it will not need books anymore, but it will always
need trees, and then they will fertilize the trees with books.»
Whatever
the future may bring, the only conclusion I have reached is this one: I
am devoted to all trees, but I am in love with pines. And I also feel a
special fascination for the copper beech.
Fallen trees, forever living trees.
|
Son los fascinantes
árboles fósiles, caídos y eternizados por la petrificación. En abril de
2007 se encontró el árbol más antiguo conocido hasta la fecha, con 385
millones de años, que vivió en unas fechas en que aún no habían
aparecido sobre la Tierra ni los dinosaurios ni, por supuesto, el
hombre. Sus únicos compañeros eran los artrópodos. Es un ejemplar de
Wattieza cladoxylopsid del Devónico, un tipo de helecho arborescente
hallado en el condado de Schoharie, en el estado de Nueva York. Tiene
casi nueve metros de altura y, de manera excepcional, conserva las
ramas y las raíces; se mantenía en pie cuando fue cubierto por
sedimentos y posteriormente se fosilizó. Igualmente impresionantes son
los bosques petrificados del noreste de la provincia de Santa Cruz, en
la Patagonia argentina, más jovenes 
Significado cívico, y
político, tiene el árbol de Guernica, el roble bajo el que el Señor de
Vizcaya primero y los reyes castellanos después juraban respetar los
fueros vizcaínos; hoy, el Lehendakari promete allí cumplir su cargo.
Una misma historia, pero cuatro ejemplares en una línea sucesoria que
arranca del siglo XIV con el “árbol padre”, que vivió hasta 1742; en su
lugar se plantó el “árbol viejo”, superviviente hasta 1860 y sustituido
a su vez por el “árbol hijo”, que murió en 2004 y fue reemplazado por
uno de sus retoños. Recogí, antes de que fuera talado, algunas ramitas
tronchadas por el viento, que forman parte del libro nº 924. El roble
de Guernica es testigo del drama de una población y símbolo del pueblo
vasco, es también ejemplo de respeto a la vida arbórea, y de
colaboración por parte del hombre en la pervivencia de determinados
ejemplares.
Mis actuaciones en el
campo del conservacionismo han sido misiones salvíficas más sigilosas.
El libro nº 523, Sacrificio, forma parte de una serie sobre la
salvación de la corta de un importante conjunto de pinos en mis bosques
del Valle de la Fuenfría. En el invierno de 1992 se marcó allí una
numeración de corta según el método tradicional de sacar un trozo de la
corteza y escribir un número en los árboles que serán talados. Eran 991
pinos en Los Helechos, una zona de bosque profunda y sombría, casi
inalterada. Me propuse salvar los pinos que por su antigüedad,
majestuosidad, formas y rareza consideré que debían seguir existiendo.
Para ello camuflé el tajo que se da al tronco para estampar la
numeración. Quitaba el número de un pino de gran fuste o belleza y lo
pasaba a otro más pequeño. Esto descolocaba a los forestales, que no se
decidían a iniciar el trabajo. No estando seguro de la eficacia de este
método, me dirigí al responsable de la Agencia de Medio Ambiente, Juan
Vielva, solicitando la salvación de doce pinos, que fueron borrados de
la lista. Finalmente, conseguí evitar la totalidad de la corta.
