Cedar
© CedricBregnard.ch
What would our childhoods be like without it, sheltering our hide-and-seek games, offering its branches to our swings, or to our feet when we decided to climb, ever higher ; without it populating the tales our parents told us in the evening before going to sleep ? It adorns parks, botanical gardens, estate promenades and allotments. It’s so fast-growing, majestic, protective and major despite its eternal greenness.
“A cedar that’s always green is a people that’s always young, despite a cruel past”.
claims the Lebanese flag, which has chosen the tree as its emblem. And the cedar’s past is just as eventful as that of the peoples of the Near East. He is already one of the protagonists in the myth of Osiris’ death. When the evil Seth locks his brother in his sarcophagus, the royal remains float down the Nile, then upstream to Byblos. There, a bush surrounds and protects the coffin, and, mingling with the divine corpse, becomes an imposing cedar, the backbone of the God. Later, the sarcophagi of the pharaohs and wealthiest Egyptians would be carved from the essence, as a promise of eternal life. Pharaoh’s cedar later became Solomon’s cedar, a nickname coined by Chateaubriand in reference to the king who built Jerusalem’s first temple. Its construction took seven years, with Solomon sending some thirty thousand lumberjacks to cut hundreds of trees in the forests of Lebanon. Cedar’s reputation is such, its wood so noble, so unalterable, its fragrance so pleasant, that the essence almost dies.
For the first victim of deforestation is the cedar, despite threats from the Emperor Hadrian who, far more concerned about the environment than Bolsonaro, passed a law in 125 A.D. to put an end to abusive logging.
Alas, even Hadrian can’t help it when the Church encourages people to live in houses with cedar beams, as rot-proof as souls must be against corruption. While cedars grace our parks, it would take centuries for forests to return to the way they were before ships, temples and houses.
At the root of these trees familiar to our Western wanderings, the early 18th
th
century. When explorers, botanists and the wealthy traveled to bring back the rarest seeds to compete in the gardens of other privileged people. Shoots of Cedar, from Lebanon but also from the Atlas, with its blue foliage, or from the Himalayas, rising higher than its cousins, were planted as early as 1720, reaching our 21
th
century. And allow us to admire these great trees that shelter our confidences, our prayers, our kisses or our picnics. Because the tabular shapes that the crowns take on with age give cedars the air of a house with a leafy roof, under which to suspend time and rediscover the memory of our ancestors. The Celts, for example. When the forests were so dense that they blocked out the sky and the stars, the Celts observed the trees rather than the constellations. Cedar represented longevity and revelation. It was the tree of knowledge and supreme justice, and those born under its sign were considered visionaries. You might come back from a stop at the foot of a cedar tree with clearer ideas, sharper intuitions, or at least your nostrils more awake to the delights of nature.
