Adam Robiński
Writer, author of the books Hajstry. Krajobraz bocznych dróg and Kiczery. Podróż przez Bieszczady (both published by Czarne). Winner of the Grand Prix of the Lądek Mountain Festival and the Travelery and Nagroda Magellana awards. He is a regular contributor to Tygodnik Powszechny and Pismo. Magazyn Opinii.
“It Takes Time”
By photographing the most famous Polish oak for years, Paweł Pierściński tells, above all, a story about life and death. And probably also about sacredness.
In Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory, one May in the mid-19th century, a Norwegian immigrant, Jørgen Hoel, sticks six chestnuts into the ground somewhere in western Iowa. He knocked them down from a New York tree a few months earlier on the day he proposed to his future wife. Two gestures – a declaration of love and planting a grove – mark the beginnings of a multi-generation family saga. However, the harsh winters on the prairie decimate both the Hoel offspring and the trees. When the second generation inherit the farm from their parents, they only see one splendid chestnut from their windows. The tree becomes an attraction in the pancake-flat landscape. The more so because a plague brought from Asia is raging in the east of the United States, wiping off ruthlessly the entire population of the species. The Hoel chestnut lives because it is all alone. It also becomes a sort of family amulet – starting in March 1903, on the 21st of each month, John, Jørgen’s son, mounts a camera on a tripod in front of the tree and takes a picture. A portrait of the motionless family member. After a year, he has twelve of them. Even though each photograph is theoretically the same, it is completely different.
But one year is not enough, so Hoel keeps photographing the tree. Then the grandson of the one who planted the tree takes over. By the end of World War II, the chestnut tree is four decades older and the pile has grown to five hundred photos. Then time seems to speed up. No matter which Hoel is behind the lens, the successive pictures are the only thing that matters. The family has a sense of duty, but towards the ancestors rather than the tree. Three-quarters of a century pass in five seconds when you flick through them like you do with the pages of a book. The passing years and seasons, the changeable weather, the appearing and disappearing leaves and their colours allow you to see the tree the way it is at a pace that people want.
The pace that people want – it’s easier for us to comprehend the power of a tree in a time lapse video, because communing with it here and now is more like staring at a still photograph, which apparently says too little. Not a word about the hardships of germination, about the persistent struggle for photons, about the painstaking crown-building, confronting the winds, storms and snow, about broken branches and scarred wounds. Nor does it say anything about what – let us be honest – most interests us in this puzzle, namely the background noise, the history of the human world, which goes in the fringes of a plant’s portrait. Even though every tree is a time capsule where we lock the crumbs of history, it takes more than a cursory glance to open it.
A Celebrity Tree
I want to believe that this was Pierściński’s motivation when he portrayed the pedunculate oak Bartek near Kielce for several years in a row. It is the most famous tree in Poland, at least by name, which is not very dignified though, rather childish, derived from the name of the forest district where it grows. Bartek is a representative of all ‘monument trees’ in Poland. The tree is one of our first associations when we talk about the oldest times, and is mentioned in one go with momentous events and outstanding historic figures: Mieszko I, the Battle of Grunwald, the partitions, constitutions, Bartek. It doesn’t matter the oak near Zagnańsk in the Świętokrzyskie region is not twelve hundred years old, as was claimed in the interwar period, but less than seven hundred, which means that it is neither the oldest tree in Poland, nor even the oldest oak.
As was once explained to Naszemiasto.pl by the dendrologist Cezary Pacyniak, who had estimated the age of a number of Polish methuselahs, “you have to drill them on four sides with a Pressler core drill, which samples a thin, almost transparent slice from the tree’s cross-section. The drill must be made of extraordinary quality steel – in fact, only Swedes can make it properly. The age is read from the pattern of rings in the sample and from what is referred to as diameter at breast height or DBH. At this height, 130 cm above the ground, the tree trunk is evenly developed. You also need to measure the height of the tree.
It is thanks to such methods that we know that there are older oaks than Bartek, for example, Bażyński’s oaks in Kadyny, Elbląg poviat (approx. 720 years) and Chrobry from Piotrowice, Żagań poviat (760 years). According to the current state of knowledge, the oldest Polish tree is the common yew from Henryków Lubański in the Lower Silesia region. If you wanted to hear the voices of the first Piast rulers in the swoosh and crackling of branches, you should probably sit underneath the nameless Henryków yew. Pacyniak has estimated its age at almost 1300 years.
Pierściński photographed Bartek for obvious reasons. The tree grows near Kielce, next door, at a busy road. The authors of a study presenting the oldest trees in Poland published by the State Forests and PWN attribute the great ‘marketing’ success of Bartek just to the convenient location. Bartek got into the spotlight when in 1934 Professor Władysław Szafer, a preeminent biologist and founding father of several Polish national parks, and then the chairman of the State Council for Nature Conservation, announced the search for record-old trees growing within the borders of Poland. Ever since, the oak has been an obligatory item on the itinerary of any school excursion, and the inhabitants of the Kielce region have simply appropriated it, calling it ‘their tree.’ We do not know whether Pierściński revered it in the same way since no record of what he thought is extant. But we do have the pictures. Dozens of monochrome and colour photographs, most of which were taken towards the end of the 20th century, and some much earlier, when the mighty tree did not need as many supports as it does today. Therefore it cannot be concluded that Pierściński was particularly consistent in taking Bartek’s photos. After all, he did not travel to Zagnańsk at regular intervals, nor was he faithful to a specific composition, unlike the protagonists of Powers’ novel. At a glance, there was more chance than deliberation to his portraying the tree. And yet, one cannot help but get the impression that it was not individual photographs of Bartek that mattered to Pierściński, but their multitude. As if each of them was just a leaf, a twig, a root, but not yet a tree. It takes time to see it as it truly is, not just at a specific moment. The photographer was capable of giving this time both to the tree and to himself. Today we would say that Bartek was Pierściński’s long-term project.
A Branched Dimension
In one of the most characteristic excerpts of WG Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the eponymous character launches into a long monologue at the Greenwich Observatory about time as the most artificial of human inventions. He argues that associating its flow with the rotation of the planet around its axis is as arbitrary as a calculation based on the increase in wood mass or the process of calcium decay. Time cannot be a river, for it has no source, nor does it flow into any sea. Any watercourse is limited on both sides, so what could the borders of time be? And how does it happen that time can stand still to rush ahead on other occasions? When confronted with photographs of trees, we are forced into similar reveries. Time is the most densely branched of all dimensions – as Sebald could say through the mouth of his Austerlitz. One where nothing is unambiguous. After all, a tree lives several types of time cycles. A linear one, measured from the germination to the death of the last cell, but also a circular one, the rhythm of which is set by the seasons and related vegetative processes, which repeat ad nauseam. The biography of a tree is also a story of years of fruitfulness and want, years of intensive work for the benefit of future generations and those that could be referred to in capitalist terminology as a recession. A crash. An oak tree can be dying, building its bark out of the dying cells, and at the same time be reborn, releasing from its dormant branches leaves ready to team up with the sun every year. Finally, it is the only manifestation of afterlife that we can be sure of – a rotting trunk stunning with its aromas becomes a microcosm of invertebrates, bacteria and fungi. This journey of souls is both utilitarian and sublime. Like an aerial funeral, practiced where the soil does not unfreeze enough to be dug in, and where eagles and vultures are the gravediggers. Thus, it seems that the classically understood concepts of life and death are abstract in the context of a long-lived tree and simply not worth much.
Sometimes, when photographing the oak, Pierściński also seems to mock human calendars. Probably, most strongly when, having already said goodbye to Bartek, he captures – perhaps by accident – a Fiat 126p rushing on the Zagnańsk road. It is October, the road shoulder is covered with leaves and the roadside avenue is painted gold. A sharp right turn sign looms into view over the near horizon, but the driver takes no notice of the warning. Not only that. His car flies, like the DeLorean, in which Marty McFly kept returning to the future. The photograph cannot lie – the greenish Fiat 126p has no wheels, but is simply hovering over the Kielce land. Modernity, progress, unmatched momentum and static, motionless, boring oaks in the Bartek alley. The blurry world of people and the expressive, meaningful persistence of plants. Abstraction and concrete. Incidentally, twenty years or rather twenty rings later the photograph acquires yet another dimension. The Fiat 126p, a symbol of speed and modernity several decades back, is just a wreck. Perhaps a relic that is immobile more often than it rides. Rather than admiration, it evokes nostalgic smiles, like the series of bravado films by Robert Zemeckis watched many years after the premiere. They would also do with steel supports today.
On the same October day, Pierściński takes a few more pictures in Zagnańsk. They include an inconspicuous macro photograph, a part of Bartek’s trunk with several meaningful details: a metal Crucifixion statue, square sheets of bark with which the necrosis has been patched up, and a silver lightning rod. Three nuances, but it is still the same story about passing. When Pierściński saw Bartek for the first time – whenever that happened – the latter was already a very old oak, and yet the photographer managed to capture the ageing of the tree over the years that followed. However, they are all subtle signals to be searched for in the fringes of the photographs: the branch supports, first made of wood (the earliest one was installed in 1949), then of steel (today there are fifteen of them); the fencing, which moves ever farther from the trunk to protect it from mechanical damage by visitors; and finally, the already mentioned patches made of the bark of other trees – transplanted skin. Interestingly, there are no pictures that would depict the effects of the 1953 and 1984 storms, which broke Bartek’s side branches, nor even the 1991 storm, when a lightning struck the northern part of the crown.
A Survivor’s Ballad
Pierściński’s photographs rarely show the imposing silhouette of the tree as a whole. Symmetrical and even. What we see are mostly acute angles, proving that the oak has had plenty of space for itself for a long time. A constant supply of sunlight from all around. The Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer once wrote about a similar tree, growing somewhere in the Stockholm Archipelago – that it resembled a frozen elk with a seven-mile crown. Speaking of animals, Bartek rather resembles an octopus put upside down. When the ubiquitous branches hide under the leaves, little else can be seen. At other times – as in an October 1999 picture – the tentacles appear to reach the stratosphere. It is in this flickering of the seasons, the interlacing of green, autumn and winter, that the photographer’s fascination comes closest to the obsession of the literary Hoel family. The tree dashes motionless along the passing time. But soon after, there is much commotion in the pictures. Consider a set of five June 1996 photographs. They can be read like a comic book with no bubbles. Summer must have come early that year, because in the first photo Bartek’s foliage screens the whole sky, and there is not a single yellow dandelion at the tree’s feet anymore. The second photograph shows Bartek from a distance with the foreground depicting a road and a group of children standing in pairs. Bare calves march to the gate with a sign reading ‘Oak Bartek.’ This has to be one of those trips held at the end of the school year, when all grades have been assigned, and teachers are relieved with their kids out of class. Shot number three: the children have already seen Bartek, and now Pierściński has a quarter of an hour for himself, for a sandwich and a race across the green grass. Picture four: the kids are returning to the bus, the rear are marching meekly, shoulder to shoulder, but the front press on. They are pure energy, like the Fiat 126p that will fly along the same road in two years’ time, defying the law of gravity. The fifth photograph actually does not differ from the first one. Bartek is all alone and represents pure geology again. A clock wound up almost seven hundred years ago.
The solitude of the venerable oak hides the deepest truth about this type of natural monuments. Trees are social beings. It is their nature to form a crowd, be part of a bustling, multi-species community. We have always known this intuitively, although the world of Western science has embraced this truth only recently. First of all, thanks to the research of the Canadian botanist Suzanne Simard, who has brought to light the complicated web-like network of mycorrhizal relationships in a forest environment. And yet, we truly start paying attention to trees only when they stand out from the crowd. With their size, shape, or the species they represent. We are not into stories about mass. We would rather look at individuals than the forest. As the poet Gary Snyder once wrote, he had been passing the same age-old oak for twenty years, before he realised one day, quite unexpectedly, that it existed. He saw ‘its oakiness,’ ‘its self,’ as if he suddenly encountered another human, a living being.
Thus, in addition to singing a song of a survivor, a single ancient oak sings a sad ballad about a felled forest. About a sea of trees, most of which would have reached a similar age had it not been for the saws and forest management plans. When confronted with the seven-century-old Bartek and similar methuselahs, we cannot help but wonder why they have been spared. What is the story behind their persistence?
When in the winter of 2011, forester Denis Cronin was flagging a twelve-hectare area of old-growth forest on Vancouver Island, Canada, for clearcutting, he found among the trees to be felled a trunk so wide he could have hidden his truck behind it, as the journalist Harley Rustad puts it when giving an account of the forester’s impressions. When Cronin looked up, he saw a smooth, limbless column protruding well above the canopy of the forest. When he started measuring the Douglas fir, he was amazed at the readings of his hypsometer. The tree was 70 meters high, around the height of a 20-storey apartment building, and nearly 12 meters in circumference. This could have meant that the tree is a thousand years old. Having worked all day with orange, red, and pink tapes, which he used for marking the clearcutting area, Cronin took out green tape from his pocket and marked the giant. The loggers who entered the forest a few weeks later knew they were not supposed to touch it. When you look at pictures of the Big Lonely Doug today, you can see a minaret amidst dwarf plantation. There is no point of reference. What strikes is the loneliness, but not necessarily the size. It is only when seen from a drone, with the extant forest in the background, that the survivor seems to shoot up.
So when it comes to the pre-Columbian Doug, we even know the saviour’s name and the tool –unobtrusive green tape. Aleksandra Wachniewska, a painter from Roztocze and of Roztocze, and above all of the local beech forests, once recalled how she and her father had hung shrines and crosses on ancient trees designated for felling. “No logger would ever touch a tree with a shrine on it,” she argued. Being nameless as they are, many of the trees can still be admired in the vicinity of Zwierzyniec. In Estonia, where a large proportion of the population still adhere to ancient animistic beliefs, people hang strings or coloured yarns on some trees, thereby adding them to the pantheon of saints.
A Sacred Place
The landscape inhabited by the Sami, an indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, used to be dotted by sacredness. Completely different from today’s, which is primarily linked to human activities. Nowadays, sacredness or holiness is attributed mainly to human-made things: buildings, objects, laws; as well as people, some being worshipped even while they are still alive. By contrast, for the Sami people what happens at the intersection of the senses, especially sight and hearing, is sacred. The unusual shape of an arratic boulder lit by the early spring light, the sound of wind in the crown of an old pine tree, night-time hoots of demons. Along their reindeer herding routes, as well as in the vicinity of permanent settlements, the Sami visited seidis, embodiments of their beliefs. Seidis comprised extraordinary boulders, trees with strange silhouettes (which, given the local climate conditions did not have to be impressive in size), lonely islands on lakes. Seidis were inhabited by spirits and were spirits themselves. They were made offerings for them to ensure successful hunting or fishing. Some of them were common to entire communities, others were specific for families or individuals.
And what if Pierściński treated Bartek in this way and him photographing the tree was a kind of offering? Or maybe the purpose of his ‘pilgrimages’ to Zagnańsk was to be with the tree rather than photograph it? Perhaps he just wanted to stay there for a while, watch the tree’s crown, and have his worries dispersed within the mycorrhizal network? Or ask Bartek for advice and intercession? Perhaps he pressed the shutter button just like that, inattentively or out of habit? We all know the feeling evoked by being close to an ancient oak tree, the sudden sense of humbleness that we otherwise seek to erase from our everyday lives. Respect for oakiness is something that cannot be displaced by decades of galloping urbanisation, even if we all suddenly switched to flying cars. This is a category that does not need to be explained in our culture. And since oaks first appeared on Earth 2.6 billion years ago, the rest is just a flash. So maybe the pictures that Pierściński took in Zagnańsk do not speed up time at all, but stop it. Because we humans probably cannot quite decide what pace we want for trees.
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