An ancient chestnut tree stands on guard at the entrance to our Apennine domain. When I saw it for the first time I knew we would be truly safe here, far away from the troubles of the mundane world and its weariness. This sylvan senator’s fantastique, gnarled trunk, its still bare branches in the midst of winter, its ‘is-ness’, its reason for being there utterly enraptured me. I put the palm of my hand on its bark and felt a profound planet-heat seeping through my veins, transfixing my whole being. For infinitesimal showers of time I became one with the soul of the earth’s oldest living species.
I was intrigued by the old letter-box, long since disused, pressed into the giant’s side and placed within it a terracotta image of our Madonna, salvaged from the fountain on the surrounding wall of our old house.
I knew that since the birth of time trees have been worshipped as primaeval deities, providers of shade in torrid summers, suppliers of fuel in freezing winters, givers of food in the fruits they drop into our laps, inspirers of artists, painters and musicians. I cast my mind back to that melting Handel aria ‘Ombra mai fu’ (more popularly known as ‘Handel’s Largo –it’s actually a larghetto) from his opera ‘Serse’ where the following words are sung to a plane tree:
Ombra mai fu Never was there made
di vegetabile, a shade of a plant
cara ed amabile, dear and loving,
soave più. or more gentle.
Handel, of course, also wrote that other equally seductive aria from his enrapturing ‘Semele’: ‘Cool shades where’er you walk.’
Flowing from a tree folding one in sweetest, umbrageous perfumes to one which threatens with mysterious earth-power I remembered the first act of Wagner’s Die Walküre where Sieglinde, unhappily married to Hunding, lives in a forest shack with an ash tree growing in its centre into which a sword called Nothung was thrust ages past by Wotan. It just needs a hero to come along and extricate it at the moment he is most desperate. In the middle of a raging storm that hero in the form of Siegmund, Sieglinde’s brother arrives and the deed is accomplished in a highly charged sexual atmosphere.
From provider of shade to supernatural help the operatic tree can also give exquisite joy and, as a resident of the Lucchesia, Tuscany, and its most well-known son, Giacomo Puccini, I can think of nothing better than that lovely aria from his ‘Gianni Schicchi’ where Rinuccio sings ‘Firenze è come un albero fiorito’ (Florence is like a tree in bloom that has its trunk and branches in Piazza della Signoria but whose deep roots extend to fertile fields and valleys).
The truth is, however, that a tree is its own music: in the leaves that rustle invitingly in the breeze and the birds that chirrup in the safe haven of its branches and set up home there.
The other day I was pleasantly surprised to find that ‘our’ chestnut tree had been beautified by one of its loyal admirers. Sandra had planted some colourful snapdragons around its trunk together with other floral tributes among the woodland anemonies.
May we worship our lovely chestnut tree for as long as we have life on this mother-earth!