TOtrees that are good for you. Many wonder why The girl from the swamp by zoologist Delia Owens (Solferino) remained in the rankings for a year. Reese Witherspoon, who has produced the film (now in theaters), and Taylor Swift, who wrote the song on the soundtrack, loved it madly because it’s such a fine example of new nature writing, a genre of narrative where the ecosystem is the protagonist. At least as much as Kaya, who lives alone in a marshy area of the North Carolina, where one of America’s oldest trees was discovered in 2019, a bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) which according to dendrochronology is 2624 years old, i.e. it was alive when Nebuchadnezzar II had the idea of building the Hanging Gardens in Babylon (long before the Vertical Forest). Kaya collects trees by drawing them, capturing their magic and details together with those of shells, birds, flowers. To explain the success of the book, the New York Times hypothesizes a need/desire to draw on the mysterious world that the ancient trees let us imagine.
The Global Promise
Could this be the reason why politicians of all latitudes have in common the promise to plant some? They did it for us too. During the electoral campaign, there was a sort of bullish game: one million, three, five, ten… It is convenient in every sense: there are 330 million euros to spend throughout Italy to reach 6.56 million trees by 2024 with quotas already decided city by city. Nothing comparable to London which wins hands down with its eight million, or the Urban Food Forest in Atlanta (USA) which integrates shrubs, fruit trees and vegetables with the idea of an autarkic city.
“More trees! More trees!” is the new mantra. To the macro numbers are added the micro ones of the collectors who meet at the fairs (Verde Grazzano, Orticolario, Orticola) they all know each other, save species. Uros Nemec & Stefano Morsolin live in Sveto, a village on the Bainsizza plateau, in Slovenia. After years of research they decided to share their passion for flowering cherry trees with the rest of the world. Thus was born theCherry Orchardwhich collects 40 varieties, and in April, a time of spectacular flowering, welcomes pilgrims-collectors.
Passion trees
Also Nurseries Tintori they have in their story a sharp turn due to grandfather Oscar who had a hobby of citrus fruits (the family grew flowers). Eventually they abandoned roses and devoted themselves to lemons and oranges: 400 varieties. «One of those we have helped to recover is the “Bizzarria” bitter orange, found in the garden of the Villa Medicea di Castello, brought back to the Boboli garden and to the botanical garden of Florence to prevent it from being lost again» they say. «It is a rarity because it has fruits of both bitter orange and citron lemon. We have other plants unknown to many, such as lumia, orangelo, variegated citrus fruits, sweet limes».
And fortunately, in Agrigento, there was Francesco Monastra, a scholar who took the fate of almond trees to heart. The farmers had reduced the 200 known varieties to sixteen, then to three-four. In 1997, at the foot of the hill where the temple of Juno stands, the Living Almond Museum which collects them all, from the “pullara” to the “palma”, from the “communist”, to the unusual “Stalin’s mennula”. Monastra would like the initiative of theOccitane which he had planted on the plateaus of Valensole, in Haute Provencefifteen thousand almond trees, and another thousand will arrive shortly for the joy of the 130 farmers spread over 80 hectares.
Same story for the Contadour chestnuts: 600 new trees, 14 preserved varieties. Then, at Christmas, there will be the limited edition Karitè with green chestnut and no one can imagine that behind it there is the “rehabilitation” (it’s called that) of a forest. Operation underway also in Basilicata with the association Rocciaviva of Matera who has already planted four thousand trees.
But no one is as visionary as Mohammed Aissaoui, the French engineer who created My Farm Dubai, self-sufficient eco-farm in the middle of the desert. Its (cold) greenhouse houses an incredible collection of eggplant trees (the tallest, almost three meters, come from the East). They are not sold, they can only be gawked at. “Does that seem strange to you?” smiles Aissaoui. “It’s no stranger than collecting specialized books in a library.” And yes, maybe we should study.
30 percent of trees at risk of extinction
Arboretum The big book of trees by Tony Kirkham Katie Scott, Rizzoli, 100 pages, €26
arboretum (Rizzoli), a magnificent illustrated by Toni Kirkham and Katie Scott brings us closer to the forests. Did you know that the crown of a mature oak has more than a hundred thousand leaves? That ginko biloba is the same as it was 250 million years ago? That unfortunately thirty percent of species are at risk of extinction? Faced with the terrible news, everyone would like an “angel tree” license. And the Belmond chain does everything to deserve it. It has a collection of hotels and a less famous collection of trees. At Villa San Michele (Fiesole) he is carrying out the conservative restoration of the two and a half hectares of the Monumental Park of Monte Ceceri that surround it. The wood is dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci who apparently experimented with his flying machine here in 1506 (for the record, it went badly). Castello di Casole, in Tuscany, boasts one of the largest estates in Italy (1700 hectares inhabited by roe deer, hares, fallow deer, pheasants, wild boars)that is three hundred thousand trees, one more, one less, mostly oaks but also holm oaks, Turkey oaks, olive trees.
Of course, even just one tree can be planted/saved. Guido Vigna, eighty years old, historical journalist of the World, owns a centuries-old oak from the Mocheni Valley. In 2013, returning from a walk in Trentino, he noticed the sign: “For sale plant” with a mobile phone number written on it: “Without thinking too much, I bought it”. Then, there is, last chance, the distance adoption: an olive tree (initiative launched by Palazzo di Varignana), a tree of your choice (cherry, chestnut, beech, oak) in the upper Orba valley, a mango in Kenya, an orange grove behind our house. But only in a real forest will we be able to hear, as Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize 2019, tells us, The whisper of the world.
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