When a Great Tree Inspires Love, Who Has the Right to Cut It Down?

Photography: Liu Chen-hsiang

"Look, this is a breadfruit tree. The leaves come in both pinnate and ovate forms."

"Why are there both pinnate and ovate ones? Our teacher picked up some breadfruit leaves for us to look at last time."

"A cinnamon tree. This one is so tall and so big. Smell this leaf."

"Mm, so fragrant, so fragrant."

"The cherry blossoms are out. Let's pick one, and when we get to school we'll give it to the first teacher we see."

"Mom, you hold it carefully, or it'll be gone later and we won't be able to give it to the teacher."

"So your school has a really tall magnolia too. Mom never noticed."

"Where? Where?"

"Mom, today the teacher took us to Roosevelt Road to pick kapok flowers!"

Before we had even stepped into the courtyard, the fragrance rushing at us left us spellbound

I often walked my son to and from school through the Daan and Zhongzheng districts of Taipei, and the little one always complained that the road was long. But by pointing out the plants along the way and talking about them as we looked, we would reach school in no time, and my son would still say wistfully, "So our home really is close to school!" I truly thank these plants from the bottom of my heart. Cluster upon cluster of green has composed countless beautiful, good memories, healed a tired and jaded heart, and served as the perfect topic of conversation between mother and son.

 

And as city dwellers, having a home in a downtown community surrounded by greenery is an even greater blessing.

Waking early in the morning, this "senior" old community of more than 40 years is brimming with vital enzymes: magpies, Japanese white-eyes, thrushes, sparrows, and Taiwan barbets perch high among the paper mulberries, mulberries, bishop wood trees, camellias, and banana shrubs, chirping and twittering in song. Starting a day this way fills the heart with praise.

Outside the kitchen window, the paper mulberry with its tangle of branches surely grew from a seed that drifted in by accident. This plant, commonly known as the "deer tree," is regarded by people here as a lowly weed, yet as early as the "Minor Odes: Cry of the Crane" in the Classic of Poetry it is written: "How delightful is that garden, where the sandalwood grows, and below it the paper mulberry." The "gu" referred to there is the paper mulberry. Its bark can be made into paper, and every year it bears glistening red berries that draw birds from near and far to stop and feast, chattering and hopping about as if discussing which berry is the tastiest, and listening to them, I feel my heart start to sing along.

 

In our lush green courtyard stands a gardenia that has shot up more than two stories tall, with a trunk about 30 cm in diameter. A gardenia of this size is, you might say, rare.

In early summer, the gardenia takes the stage as the lead performer, its snow-like fragrant blossoms bursting into bloom with an abundance of showy vigor. Before you have even set foot in the courtyard, the fragrance rushing at you leaves you spellbound, and you cannot help but take several deep breaths to draw that pure sweetness in until it fills your heart and drives the foul air of the city out.

In the first three years after moving here, every summer when the gardenias bloomed, I would greedily breathe in the scent, casually break off a branch, or pick two or three blossoms, place them in a small dish of water by the window, and when I opened the door upon returning home, the rich fragrance would instantly fill my whole being.

 

 

The gardenia, the large-leaf mulberry, the bishop wood, the camellias, and the palm were cut down one after another

Who would have thought that one morning when I came downstairs, one fork of the Y-shaped gardenia trunk had been sawed off. My heart tightened, and after asking around indignantly I learned that an eighty-year-old woman in the community suffering from depression had asked her son-in-law, after his retirement, to cut it down, and after a few neighbors protested and tried to stop them, the old woman and her son-in-law had no choice but to keep quiet for a few months.

Some days later, its other fork was cut through with a single stroke. By rights the gardenia should have been finished, but a plant's life force is stubbornly tenacious, and it put out several more branches and leaves from the side of the trunk, even bursting forth a few blossoms, so the neighbors struck again with a ruthless hand, determined to put it to death. The saw then reached out toward the red and white camellias about a story tall, the palm, and even the large-leaf mulberry that bore heavy fruit every spring, and the courtyard grew sparse and thin, turning somewhat bleak.

A few days ago when I rose in the morning, it seemed as if a space had opened up to the right of the window: another bishop wood tree had been sawed off alive, not a leaf left, so that it could no longer photosynthesize. Clearly the intent was to cut off its life.

Another tree had been cut down. My heart felt an aching sense of loss. These trees had stood there perfectly well for decades. Who exactly were they in the way of? By what right do people deprive a plant of its life without a moment's thought?

"Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself." This is the order the Creator gave to the world, and where great trees stand is an even more beautiful promise of abundant life.

There are thousands of reasons to cut down a tree. We cruelly act as we please, fixated on humanism, thinking that people are the center of the world, and that anything not directly and immediately connected to us can simply be boldly removed and done away with, as if that were only right. As a result, people gradually pay the price of draining the pond to catch all the fish. A tree that takes a hundred years to grow is not easy to raise, yet cutting down a hundred-year-old tree takes only an instant. Melting Arctic ice and the Japanese tsunami may feel far away from us, but if one day we open our eyes and find that the parks have vanished, that the street trees are gone, that the trees on campus have disappeared, that the natural, many-layered greenery has vanished without a trace, the world will surely be like a desert wasteland after a great catastrophe; and our life memories will in the end lose the clues by which to savor them.

There are thousands of reasons to cut down trees, and hundreds of billions of reasons to protect them. We ought to look anew at the relationship between trees and all living things with a compassionate cosmology.