From her hiding place, Anne Frank saw a tree. It was an old horse chestnut tree with white flowers that reminded that girl, who was confined in three secret rooms of a house in Amsterdam, that there was a world out there, a world in which time, with its seasons printed on the deciduous leaves, of the chestnut tree, ran at a different pace than his imposed captivity. Perhaps the tree, that homeland of childhood, the nostalgia of play and laughter, of the afternoons spent under her shelter, would also whisper a promise to her: that one day she too would be there again, under the leaves of the chestnut tree.
Because freedom is a tree or, at least, it looks like one. And while it is true that of the ten inhabitants of the hiding place, only Anne's father, Otto Frank, would return from the extermination fields, the tree, that untamable old chestnut tree, would still be there. It was years later, in 1968, when Otto asked himself: “How was I to know how much it meant to Ana to see a piece of blue sky and observe the seagulls in their flight, and how important the chestnut tree was to her…? But he began to crave all this when he felt like a caged bird. “The only thing that comforted her was thinking about nature and the outdoors.” Anne Frank understood early, at an age when we don't have to understand these things, that trees are what will survive us.
The oldest tree in the world is 9,563 years old. Located in the Dalarna province of Sweden, this Norway spruce is not only the oldest tree on the planet, but it is also probably the oldest living organism. It was discovered in 2002 and after carrying out several tests with carbon-14, its root bed, a map of life that beats underground, was dated to more than 9,500 years old.
Seeing it there, in the white immensity of a cold winter, it would seem that it is a weak and weak tree that stands wobbly on its five meters of height. But our tree didn't always have this appearance. We assume that it was first a seed – we were not there to see it – but it spent much of its life as a bush and that was the form it maintained for thousands of years due to very cold climatic conditions that prevented its growth. However, as the planet warmed it became this pin that cuts across and divides the landscape.
It was baptized by its discoverer, the scientist Leif Kullman, who came to it accompanied by his dog, Tjikko. For this reason, Kullman, in homage to his companion, named it after him, but – poetic justice – he wanted to clarify that there had been a first Tjikko that had been a seed, a bush and that had finally become the oldest tree in the world. world. Because the trees are what will survive us, an idea of freedom through the window of a hiding place, the inheritance of powerful roots that speak to us of a world that we cannot lose.
