“He who doesn’t know a Chilean forest does not know the planet”. Pablo Neruda
Another town, another room, another shape of pine. Ripples and knots repeat across the walls, where the door melts into the repeating theme. A reiteration of exaggerated growth rings and modernist fractals.
South central Chile is timber country, where whole days are ridden through blanket Pinus radiata, seas of deep-shade green, their high crowns swaying in the incessant southwesterlies, their roots in a silent gloom. Waves over the rolling hills they flow, only to suddenly cease for an evisceration of clear-fell or the skeletal agonies of forest fire. The latter being the result of direct action by radical Mapuche protestors. These plantation pines are given some relief by groves of gums, long tall single stem eucalyptus, regimented by rank and file. A sad modern monoculture so at variance with Neruda’s much quoted stanza. He wrote over half a century ago, so as an historical marker, it is poignantly significant, for I’ve found it hard to find the extensive afforestation that he envisioned. Remnants remain in protected corners, in national parks and private reserves and now in a university’s arboretum. A place to answer some of our botanical questions and confirm some of our suppositions. It’s always nice to find that were correct, after all. Still, despite the tranquility, this place is but a zoo for trees, single specimens, a solitary illustration taken out of context. That context being the woodland forest.
Now I know that there are forty-three varieties of Nothofagus, the southern beech, over five thousand in the myrtle family and that the fern that adorns river banks and damp cliffs in such vast profusion is called locally: Helechos. I have had a thought that it would complement my expanding fernery at home, so I checked out UK supplier’s prices. At those rates Chile could wipe its national debt. Still, I’m not about to attempt some bio-transference, tempting as that might be, neither am I about to turn nerdish on the plethora of southern beech varieties, just happy to have a generic single name.
There are many examples from the southern cone’s temperate rain forest, but only one specimen of the nation’s national tree. The Araucaria auracana, or Monkey Puzzle tree, and even that one has been attributed as deriving from Brazil. Any specimens that we’ve seen in plazas and gardens have been wizened, withering sticks, all near death. They were severely logged on the costal ranges until harvesting was banned in 1990. Put simply, they don’t thrive in pollution, in particular the particulates of diesel from the rumbling lumber trucks hauling pines and eucs to the ever present sawmill or the cellulose factory.
It’s those mills that have produced the cladding for our log cabin. Unfortunately it’s not in the woods, but on the top floor of a concrete high rise.
