THE
SPIRIT OF PLANTS – LIFE
LESSONS FROM A FRANKINCENSE TREE
https://wanderingquilter.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/dscf2120.jpg
I
found this post, first published in English, then in Spanish, in a Spanish blog
that I love “Imaginando Vegetales”
(Imagining plants), and that I recommend to all who like plants, poetry,
imagination, and "stories of people and plants".
It
is a beautiful and unusual story for these Christmas holidays.
You
can read it, by the author, in Spanish, aquí
As
recommended by Aina S. Erice, the author, it’s better to read it "To the sound of: Jocelyn
Pook, Chaotic Ana BSO
Words by Aina S. Erice Images by Aina S. Erice | July 17, 2016
Suppose for a moment the Indian
Upaniṣads are right, and in your next life you could come back as a tree. Which
one would you be?
The decision is no light matter,
bearing in mind a tree’s potential lifespan. You could first ponder your future
tree-self’s intrinsic characteristics – tall and handsome, or humbler in form
and stature? Flowers: yay or nay? – or you could choose according to your
future neighbourhood.
Where would you rather live? A
tropical forest, perhaps a temperate one… how about settling in a desert?
I know, I know. The neighbourhood
description might not sound too appealing. Extreme temperatures all year round,
thirst and heat common. Intense herbivore pressure. Long periods of silence and
loneliness plausible. Eremitic inclinations are advisable: company scarce and
tough.
No, probably not the most tempting
option available.
However, not everybody has the
luxury of choice, or so says the Roman poet Ovid in Metamorphoses. In his
stories of “bodies changed into new forms” by the gods, donning tree-bark and
leaf is often the result of tragedy. Violence, incest, betrayal, love, loss…
the capricious gods wreak havoc with human foibles, yet they depend on us for
worship. “Who would honour their altars with incense”, if not humans?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mythic
origins of the perfumes coveted by the gods are shrouded in suffering; and the
girls whose transformed bodies yielded the choicest of fragrances happened to
become desert trees.
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Thus the poet Ovid sings of poor
Leucothoe, princess of faraway eastern kingdoms whose beauty so enraptured the
Sun god that he literally dazzled her into being seduced. As loving fathers
were wont to do when finding out such peccadilloes, the king buried her alive
in punishment. The inconsolable lover watered her burial with perfumed nectar,
which seeped into her body until she sprang forth under a new form; and rumour
has it that the sweet-scented, sun-drenched tree that resulted was
frankincense: Boswellia sacra, also known as olibanum.
Ovid had never seen frankincense
trees growing in their native environment. Indeed, no Roman at the time seemed
to know what they even looked like; his tale simply depicted a girl’s grief
distilled into a perfume worthy of divine worship.
Frankincense trees certainly endure
their own share of hardships; living in lands scarcely touched by rain, with
impoverished soils and relentless heat like Oman, Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
It’s certainly not a charmed life –
If I were in Leucothoe’s shoes—err, roots, I would’ve been rather miffed – “it
wasn’t enough to bury me alive and turn me into a plant, now I must also grow
in a desert? Really!?”
https://imaginandovegetales.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/olibanum-map-signed.jpg
Scientifically speaking, it’s clear
we can’t be changed into plants, nor can we realistically imagine what being a
plant is like: we cannot conceive what, say, thirst feels like for a
frankincense tree. Science will never be able to tell us whether desert trees
experience ‘subjectively’ more stress than their fellows in the jungle.
Poetry and metaphor, though, are
unconstrained by scientific nitpicking. And sometimes the plant world serves as
a green mirror that reflects human ideas, concepts, even dilemmas and life
lessons back at us. Frankincense culture offers one such mirror.
Even in Ovid’s time it was known
that not all frankincense lumps are identical in quality: they vary in colour,
size, and aromatic profile. Harvest time may affect the outcome (the best time
for harvesting is said to be during the monsoon season, when the sun is at its
hottest), but there are still differences between trees growing in different
places.
One could argue that quality is
such a slippery term (it is), and that sometimes differences live within our
minds and senses (also true). Indeed, some of the most shocking news for Omani
traditional quality grading might’ve been that the essential oils of their
highest and lowest quality frankincense had nearly identical chemical profiles.
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However, let’s assume for a moment
that quality differences are objectively real. We could then ask ourselves:
why? Is it because of the trees’ own intrinsic qualities? Or is it because of
their environmental circumstances?
Fifteen years ago, a study tried to
answer the question, and the ensuing results might’ve made Ovid and his
tragedy-prone maidens proud. In comparing different environments —some more
stressful, some less— the study found that the trees yielding the highest
quality frankincense were those that lived under greater duress, with the
poorest soils and no monsoon rains (barely any monsoon dew, at that!).
It’s almost as if hardships and
constraints were sublimated into a more exquisite perfume than that obtained by
coddling and pampering the trees with nutrients and water.
Trees are not people, yet, one
could distill a frankincense-esque “moral of the story” that certainly rings
true to my ears: how adversity and strenuous circumstances can often be the
chisel that, by chipping away at the superfluous, reveals the essence, the most
‘fragrant’ qualities of a person.
It doesn’t always happen like that,
certainly. But if you are thinking about your next life as a plant, consider a
desert as a fitting neighbourhood to bring the best of yourself to the fore.”
REFERENCES (from the Spanish blog)
There are few:
The myth of Leucothoe in the
Metamorphoses of Ovid can be read freely here.
The article which analyzed the
correlations between the environmental conditions and the quality of the
incense obtained was: Al-Amri, M. y Cookson, P. A preliminary nutritional
explanation for variations in resin quality from wild frankincense (Boswellia
sacra) In the Dhofar region of the Sultanate of Oman, in Horst, WJ et al. 2001.
Plant nutrition - Food security and sustainability of agro-ecosystems: 328 ~
329.
About incense in all its splendor,
I have a series of three articles on this fascinating plant substance, which
can be viewed here in Spanish, and each article can also be read in English.
Pictures
The top photograph of the article
is a beautiful tree of Boswellia sacra in the omani park of Wadi Dawkah,
courtesy of Kathi Ewen of the blog wanderingquilter.
It is frustrating to find as few
paintings of Leucothoe (there is more of the third of the discord of the myth,
Clytie ... but of the poor Leucothoe, almost nothing). One of them is the work
that I include here, of the French paintor Antoine Boizot, and currently at the
Museum of Fine Arts of Tours (at least, according to Wikipedia). Other images and
prints can be consulted here (explanations in Italian).
The other photographs are personal.
"
A note to
conclude the article and give it a logic in this blog:
In
agriculture, the effects of restrictions on the quality of fruits and
vegetables are well known.
It is thus
that the best melons are obtained on the most clayey soils, in which plants
suffer more. The farmer chooses, between plots he disposes, those which give
him the best quality.
Similarly,
vines have little or no irrigation and little fertilization in order to
concentrate sugars and aromas. The wine obtained will only be better.
Even the
production under greenhouses, in which the plant, in theory, is placed in a
situation of total and permanent comfort, knows the problem well. Thus RAF tomato
is a variety selected for its intrinsic qualities, but which, at the end of the
cultivation cycle, is placed under stress, thanks to an artificial salinization
of the nutritional medium. The plant, stressed, absorbs little water and
nutrients, and concentrates sugars and aromas.
In fruit
production, for example, benefits of a water restriction a few days before
harvest are well known, in order to concentrate sugars and aromas, in order to
increase the taste quality.
Conversely,
any farmer knows that an abundant rainfall just before harvesting can cause a
sudden drop in all quality criteria, and possibly cancel benefits of all
efforts, such as water restriction.
But the
farmer also knows that in most cases, looking for the best quality goes to the
detriment of productivity. So it will depend on his marketing system and the
objectives he has set itself. All the art of the farmer is to succeed in
combining the best possible quality with a productivity that allows him to live
worthily of his work.
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