six
Mythic Pine, Artist’s Pine
Human thoughts about pine in antiquity seem to have varied widely. There are two strands, both complex, which come from opposite ends of Eurasia. One is Mediterranean, about classical gods and their followers, often involving violent imagery; the other is Chinese, about the tranquil wisdom achieved with old age. Northern Europeans and Siberian shamans also held beliefs about pine trees, often to do with midwinter renewal. Other cultures, especially those of pre-Columbian North America, had symbolic myths about pine trees, but they are less well recorded or have been lost in the onslaught of modernity.
In the ancient Mediterranean world pine was sacred to Zeus,1 Poseidon and Dionysus. Themes include metamorphosis and purity (the trees and branches, the Pitys myth), fertility (the cones) and blood-thirsty death. Pine wreaths were awarded to victors of the Isthmian Games held in honour of Poseidon. Pan wore a pine wreath,2 and so did Diana, the virgin huntress. Chloe, too, wore a pinea corona, which Daphne took from her and put on her own head.3
In classical Greece pine cones were connected with fertility, a belief that may have been of ancient origin. Assyrian reliefs from the ninth and eighth centuries BC show genii, mythical winged men, holding pine-cone-shaped objects (identification is not certain) and apparently fertilizing trees with them. In Greece and Rome, pine-cone fertility symbolism is more obvious. During the ancient festival of Thesmophoria, pine cones and other symbols of fecundity were thrown into the sacred vaults of the goddess Demeter, and cone-tipped wands or staffs, probably phallic symbols, were borne by the followers of Dionysus, god of wine. He had another link with pine trees. The Delphic Oracle had commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine tree equally with him, so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies.4
Darker, bloodier tales associate pine trees with Attis, a vegetation god of the Phrygians (a Bronze Age people of Anatolia) who was be loved of Cybele, mother of the gods, and, in the convoluted way of mythology, perhaps her son, or born of a girl who became pregnant when she took an almond from a tree that in turn had sprung from the genitals of the castrated Agdistis, demon son of Zeus and Cybele. Gods of vegetation often met violent deaths followed by resurrections, and there are two versions of the death of Attis. One tells that, like Adonis, he was killed by a boar; the other that he castrated himself and bled to death under a pine tree (his priests castrated themselves on entering his service).5 After his death, Attis was changed into a pine tree. His cult became established in Rome, celebrated in March when a pine tree was cut down, brought to the sanctuary of Cybele and treated as a divinity. A special guild of tree-bearers undertook the task. The trunk was treated like a corpse, swathed in woollen bands. Wreaths of violets – flowers that were supposed to have sprung from the blood of Attis – decorated it, and an effigy of the god was attached to the tree.
Edward Calvert, Pan and Pitys, mid-19th century, drawing.
Frazer, recounting the myth of Attis in The Golden Bough, remarked that it had a savagery ‘that speaks strongly for its antiquity’.6 He speculated that for the Phrygians, the evergreen nature of pine in fading autumn woods ‘may have seemed to their eyes to mark it out as the seat of a diviner life . . . exempt from the sad vicissitudes of the seasons, constant and eternal as the sky which stooped to meet it.’7
Another reason for the sanctity of the pine, he suggests, may have been related to pine nuts. The rites of Cybele were orgiastic, and per haps connected to wine brewed from pine nuts.8 A further dark and bloody myth told of Marsyas, a satyr or herdsman and a friend of Cybele, who challenged Apollo to a musical contest. Vanquished and tied to a pine tree, he was flayed by the god, Frazer suggesting this may once have been the fate of the priest of Cybele himself.9
Pine cones have fascinated humans for millennia. Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, described in 1202 the ratio by which the size of the scales increases: the Fibonacci sequence of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 . . . , common in nature. But long before this, their most consistent and visible manifestation in the art of the classical Mediterranean world was in the iconography of Dionysus (Bacchus), god of wine: Dionysus who bounds though the pine forests of Parnassus with thyrsus and deer skin.10
The thyrsus was a long staff (sometimes said to be a stem of wild fennel), tipped with a pine cone and borne by Dionysus and his followers, the maenads or bacchantes, the ‘raving ones’. It is interpreted as a phallic fertility symbol, and is common in representations of Dionysus and his initiates. In the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii there are murals depicting initiation rites undertaken by women entering the cult. One shows the god sprawling on the steps of a throne at the feet of his mother, Semele, or possibly his consort, Ariadne, whose arms support him, his ribbon-decorated, pine conetipped staff running diagonally across the fresco. Other paintings show a series of frightening and painful initiation rites, after which the cowering initiate is presented with a thyrsus of her own.11 There are numerous other representations, especially on Greek black- or red-figure ceramics. Dionysus riding a leopard, cone-tipped thyrsus in hand with ribbons flying, appears on a fourth-century BC mosaic from Pella, capital of ancient Macedonia. Classical sculptures also carry numerous representations of the thyrsus, Dionysus, the maenads and other followers such as Silenus.
Baldassare Peruzzi, Cybele in a Chariot drawn by Lions, 1496 – 1536, pen and brown ink with brown wash. Detail of print showing Cybele holding a pine cone and ears of wheat, symbols of fertility.
Fresco depicting initiation into the cult of Bacchus, second half of first century BC, from the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii. A new initiate cowers over the knees of a nurse while another woman presents her with a pine-cone-tipped thyrsus.
The maenad was popular with European artists from the seventeenth century onwards, appealing strongly to ‘Victorians in Togas’, a number of nineteenth-century neo-Classical painters who used it as a pretext for depicting beautiful young women in various stages of abandonment, very different from the received conventions of femininity of the time. John William Godward (1861–1922) painted the image of a priestess of Bacchus carrying a thyrsus at least four times. John Maler Collier (1850–1934)’s Priestess of Bacchus wears the maenad’s animal skin and an ivy wreath and carries a cone-tipped thyrsus, but has the expression of one about to bring the maenads to order. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), a French academic painter, also took bacchantes as subjects, favouring semi-draped nudes that veered towards the pornographic. In Faun and Bacchante the maenad is supported by a grinning faun, her limbs heavy with wine and a thyrsus prominent along the lower edge of the painting. Bouguereau’s Bacchante on a Panther, decorating a plate, echoes the Pelle mosaic, but the rider is a semi-naked girl, feet decorously crossed, brandishing her thyrsus.
Mediterranean antiquity produced many votive stone pine cones – several found on Cyprus date from 1000 BC to the third to first century BC. Pine-cone forms also appear on Roman glass jugs and flasks dating from the first and second centuries AD. An enormous bronze pine cone was cast as a fountain in the first or second century AD by Publius Cincius Salvius Libertus and placed in the Campus Martius area of Rome, where it gave the name to the IX rione (district), Rione della Pignia. It was moved to the Vatican by Pope Symmachus, and into a specially designed niche in the Cortile del Belvedere in the seventeenth century.12 Dante referred to it in the Divine Comedy as the pine cone of St Peter in Rome.
In the applied arts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pine cones became simple decorative motifs, as in the Royal Worcester pine-cone pattern introduced for decorating the company’s china in about 1770. Other famous companies that used the motif included Tiffany’s, who employed it on a silver bowl, and Fabergé, for which it provided inspiration for both a jewelled egg and a pine-cone decanter stopper. Pine cones were also fashionable motifs in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century silverwork as knobs for teapot lids.
Every age reinterprets the past through its own vision, and for twenty-first century viewers the idea of the pine-cone symbol seems less associated with phallic fertility and more with the notion of mystic wisdom, if Internet searches are anything to judge by. This is principally because of interest in the pineal gland, the small organ shaped like a pine cone, deep in the brain, which has come to be associated with the idea of the ‘third eye’ in eastern mysticism.
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Bronze fountain in the form of a pine cone, first century AD, now located in a courtyard of the Vatican. |
Pine trees and pine boughs are less frequent motifs, perhaps because they were more difficult to depict. A mosaic from Pompeii shows Pitys turning into a pine tree. The mid-sixteenth-century Fountain of Neptune by Bartolomeo Ammannati in Piazza della Signoria in Florence shows the god with an iron crown of pine needles and cones, echoing the pine wreath at the ancient Isthmian Games.
With their foliage magically persisting through the dark and cold of the northern winter, evergreen trees of all sorts have long intrigued Europeans. Festivals in Scandinavia and northern Russia celebrated spring resurrection and new growth in June into recent times.13 Super-natural powers were still attributed to pines in late sixteenth-century Livonia, according to the anonymous author of Cultus Arborum, who recounts that Leonard Rubenus, a monk passing through Estonia,
saw there a pine tree of extraordinary height and size, the branches whereof were full of divers pieces of old cloth and its roots were covered with many bundles of straw and hay. He asked a man of the neighbourhood what was the meaning of it; he answered that the inhabitants adored that tree, and that the women after a safe delivery brought thither these bundles of hay; that they also had a custom to offer at a certain time a tun of beer.14
Rubenus, however, cut a cross in it, then a gibbet, as a sign of contempt.
Other accounts in Cultus Arborum mention how branches from Frau Fichte (‘Mrs Spruce’), the pine of Silesia, were decorated with coloured paper and spangles, carried about by children on mid-Lent Sunday, and suspended above the doors of stables in the belief that they would prevent harm to the animals. Another belief included the idea that the pine was inhabited by wind spirits ‘owing to the whispering noise proceeding from it in the breeze’, the holes and knots being the means of ingress and egress, and a beautiful woman of Småland, really an elf, left her family through a knot-hole in the wooden wall. In parts of Germany, one way to cure gout was for a patient to climb a pine tree and tie a knot in the topmost shoot, saying as he did it, ‘Pine, I bind here the gout that plagues me.’15
Further east, the Buryats, a tribal people living around Lake Baikal, revered groves of trees, including those of Scots pine. They were shaman forests, to be ridden through in silence for fear of offending the spirits of the woods. Here too, solitary trees near villages were adorned with talismans, ribbons and sheepskins. They were called pines, even if, in practice, they were larches. Buryat shrines can still be found, constructed of poles and adorned with fabric strips and small offerings, in places as directed by the shaman.16
On the shores of Lake Baikal, a pine ‘shaman tree’ wrapped and tied with strips of cloth.
Ethnographers and folklorists have long noted an association between evergreens – pines, firs, holly, ivy – and midwinter festivals, ascribing this to the living greenery of the trees at a point when so many other plants seem dead. The Christmas tree, famously said to have been transplanted from Germany to Britain by Prince Albert, must be an echo of this, but its sentimentalized and domesticated form has lost any echoes of paganism. Hans Christian Andersen published a cautionary tale known in English as The Little Pine Tree (or sometimes, The Little Fir Tree), about a conifer wishing that it could grow up and become a beautifully decorated Christmas tree, with little thought as to what happened to a discarded tree. Pines compete with firs and spruces in the specialist market for twenty-first century Christmas trees, sensitive to factors such as price and ‘needle drop’. In twentieth-century Russia, the custom of the yëlka, Christmas tree, migrated to New Year and was celebrated as enthusiastically as politics allowed. In post-glasnost Vladivostok, American writer Sharon Hudgins noted the trees waiting to be taken into apartments of high-rise flats, ‘suspended upside down from window ledges to keep them cold and fresh, looking like uprooted evergreens blown there by the wind’.17
Pines are uncommon in the art of medieval and early modern Europe. They occur in illuminated manuscripts recounting Le Roman de la Rose, where a garden contains a ‘fountain ’neath a glorious pine, a pine so tall, straight-grown and fair’.18 Sandro Botticelli painted four panels depicting the story of Nastagio degli Onesti. This recounts a tragedy doomed ever to repeat itself in ghostly form, as a knight hunts to death the maiden who has spurned him in the pine forest of Ravenna. Botticelli’s paintings suggest how a pine forest looked in the fifteenth century, with a clear forest floor, the slender upright trunks of the trees making a visually rhythmic pattern as they recede into the distance, each topped by a dark, spreading crown. This shape was produced partly by lopping trees for fuel wood. Botticelli depicts two woodcutters in fetching and distinctive clothing – red tights, grey tunics and black hats attached to bands to prevent them from blowing away. He also includes images of rabbits and deer that suggest animals for hunting.
Pine-tree images became more frequent in the nineteenth century, when (in the generalized sense of conifers) they featured in the paintings of landscape painters, and later in the work of the Impressionists. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), a German Romantic painter, executed many images of pine trees against dramatic lighting conditions. Cross on the Mountain (1808), one of several paintings the artist made of this subject, depicts a cross against pine or fir trees, in turn silhouetted against a golden sunset sky, their spires echoed by a church in the background. Morning (c. 1820), showing the mist rising from a conifer forest against a dawn sky, is a less dramatic setting for pine trees, but one that still evokes feelings of spirituality associated with trees in vast landscapes, and a theme also much used by painters in Chinese and Japanese traditions. Pine trees recur in some of Friedrich’s other works – in snow, as backdrops for hunting or for waterfalls, and as trees enclosing smaller and more intimate, but still natural spaces.
Sandro Botticelli, The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti (first episode), c. 1483, tempera on panel. The ghostly hunt takes place in the Ravenna pineta, a forest of umbrella pines originally planted in the early middle ages.
The spiritual, deep quiet of pine forests was evoked later in the nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century by Russian landscape painters. Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898) became famous for images of pine forests, one of his best-known works being Morning in a Pine Forest (1889, reproduced on p. 46), in which a group of bears plays on fallen trunks in a primeval pine forest. Shishkin, too, referred to the subject of pine trees in all moods and weathers – summer sun and winter snow, and as settings to walk through or in which to contemplate flowing water.
Northern conifer forests were also a subject for Finnish painters from the early nineteenth century onwards. Pekka Halonen (1865– 1933) reflected this tradition, painting both the natural aspects of pines, particularly as they appear shrouded in heavy winter snow, their straight branches bowed and softened under masses of white (for instance Winter Landscape at Kinahmi, 1923), and the human one of clearing forest to use the land for agriculture (Pioneers in Karelia, 1900).
The Impressionists and their followers observed landscapes in a very different climate, producing images full of sunlight and Mediterranean colour. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) painted The Large Pine at least twice (in 1889 and 1895–7). Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) left images of Pine Trees with Dandelions (1890), his eye caught by the textural rhythms of pine bark and the manner in which the light on it was echoed by dandelion clocks, and Pine Trees Against Setting Sun with Red Sky (1889). The dark, compact shapes of umbrella pines as a feature of the French Riviera appear in the work of pointillist Paul Signac (1863–1935), their foliage massed against vibrant coastal light in Umbrella Pines at Caroubiers (1898) and The Pine Tree at St Tropez (1909).
Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape with a Church, c. 1811, oil on canvas.
Pine trees captured the attention of The Group of Seven, Canadian painters who, working at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, produced striking and enduring images with influences from Impressionism, Japanese art and Expressionism. Painting from nature in summer and working up canvases in the studio in winter, their work includes some well-known depictions, especially The Jack Pine (Tom Thomson, 1916–17, reproduced on p. 186), a single tree silhouetted against a sky of cold pale greens and golds, distant snowflecked purple mountains and a lake that reflects the sky. Although ‘Western’ in materials, techniques and concept, the composition is reminiscent of Japanese haramatsu (pines by the seashore) scenes. A single pine tree or group of pines with water, mountains and sky recurred in the Cana dian painters’ work as, among others, The West Wind (Tom Thomson, 1916–17); Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay (F. H. Varley, c. 1920); Night, Pine Island (A. Y. Jackson, 1924); and Evening Silhouette (Arthur Lismer, 1928). More prosaic aspects of the Canadian forest are repres ented: The Fire Ranger (Franz Johnston, 1921) shows the vastness of the Canadian landscape, a huge summer sky of cotton-wool clouds receding above irregular, forest-covered hills, and the fire ranger himself indicated by the small detail of a biplane dwarfed by forest and sky. Summer Day (Tom Thomson, c. 1915) shows an even larger expanse of sky, the land a distant shore across a lake scattered with a few isolated, apparently dead trees remaining from a clear-cut or fire. Tracks and Traffic (J.E.H. MacDonald, 1912) shows the implications of all this for the Canadian economy: stacked, sawn timber in the snow against a steam train, and an industrial landscape of gas holders and mill chimneys.
Paul Signac, Sails and Pines, 1896, oil on canvas. Signac’s pine trees, like those in some Japanese prints, create an intense contrast in the landscape.
Botanical illustrations provided an alternative way of depicting pine trees in Western art, for the eye isolates details in a way that is impossible for the camera to achieve. A necessity for science before the development of photography, they still show details of plants more clearly than any photograph. Those by Ferdinand Bauer in Alymer Bourke Lambert’s The Genus Pinus are some of the most beautiful illustrations of pines of all time. Drawings in other books, such as those in George Russell Shaw’s Genus Pinus, while both excellent and detailed, cannot compete with the magnificence and beauty of Bauer’s work. Drawings still tell deeper truths about botany than photography can, and in the twenty-first century Aljos Farjon’s deceptively simple line drawings show the essence of pine tree species in variety, detail and elegance.
In contrast, Chinese culture has long regarded pines as important subjects. Here, their associations were quite different from those of Europe. In China, pines have long been admired for the resilient, twisted shapes they acquire with age and their beauty generally, as symbols of wisdom, longevity, hospitality and endurance, and as landscape features. An association of pine trees with human old age in Chinese culture is so deep that ‘pine tree care’ provides an Internet address for a large Chinese care-home group. As a symbol of hospitality, one of the best-known living Chinese trees is the Guest Welcoming Pine at Huangshan, an area famous for precipitous mountain scenery with pines growing from almost-vertical rock slopes. It is one of many named pine trees in the area. Korean and Japanese culture shared the tradition of venerating and naming individual pines.
Representations of pine trees are common in Chinese art. From the ninth century onwards, Chinese landscape painting developed the form most Westerners think of, with a wash evoking a misty landscape and sharper brushstrokes using ink to add trees, mountains and birds, buildings or other details. The principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity that underlie this give an aesthetic in which the eye fills in the spaces. As common features of the Chinese landscape that also had deep spiritual significance, pine trees appear in a very high proportion of these images.
Combined with bamboo and plum blossoms, pine foliage is one of the ‘three friends of winter’, a trio used in compositions found as far back as the ninth century in both Chinese and Japanese art. Pine and bamboo are evergreen, and prunus blossom opens early in the year, so together they provide an auspicious gathering that symbolizes long life, strength, endurance and hope. Combinations in special arrangements with other plants, animals or rocks also have symbolic meanings, often relating to marital fidelity.19
Cakes of Chinese ink, moulded with patterns depicting pine trees and dragons and gilded, late 18th or early 19th century.
Ting Ying-Tsung, untitled woodcut of pine tree, plum and bamboo, 17th century.
Pines have a similar importance in Japan, both in life and in art.
They are a symbol of longevity . . . evoking wisdom and knowledge. They are resistant to change, remaining evergreen through the turning seasons, and they are strong against the elements.20
The different growth habits of pine species – Japanese red pine, with relatively soft foliage and smooth bark, and Japanese black pine, with stiff needles and rough bark – are considered feminine and masculine respectively. In Japanese culture, the needles of two-needled pines can stand for marital fidelity, and the twin pines of Sumiyoshi and Takasago, across from each other on Osaka Bay, are personified in legend by an aged couple, the man from Sumiyoshi visiting the old woman of Takasago daily. Pine has special associations with the New Year, when bamboo and pine decorations, kadomatsu, are placed one on either side of entrances, welcoming the gods into the houses.21 The link with the New Year is an old one that has carried into the twenty-first century, even though the date of the celebration has changed to 1 January from the Chinese lunar calendar, according to which the New Year fell between late January and mid-February.
Hokusai Katsushika, Tagasago Couple in the Hollow of a Pine Tree, 1811, woodcut. In Japan, pines have been a symbol of marital fidelity since at least the 14th century, when a Noh play told of the two pines whose human personifications met each night.
The Japanese adhered to a similar zodiac system, applied to both years and individual days. At New Year, they observed a custom of collecting herbs for soup, and at the same time uprooting seedling pines. This gesture (dating back to at least the eighth century) was believed to encourage longevity. It took place on the year’s first Day of the Rat, and was especially powerful if this coincided with the first day of the New Year. The custom is mentioned in the early eleventh-century Japanese Tale of Genji, in which the hero, the nobleman Genji, finds his daughter’s page girls and maids ‘playing about on the garden hill, uprooting seedling pines’ on New Year’s Day.22 Pine branches were also attached to New Year’s gifts; their overt meaning was good wishes for longevity, but also indicated children, seedling pines. In Japanese, matsu, the sound of the word used for pine tree, also sounds like the word used for the verb ‘to wait’, allowing much word play in poetry between lovers punning on the imagery of the trees and the notion of awaiting someone. Conveniently for English translators of Japanese poetry using pine-tree metaphors, the English verb ‘to pine for’ also carries a notion of waiting, allowing some of the sense in the original Japanese to be conveyed.
In Japan as in China, pine trees are a major feature of the landscape, carrying deeper meanings of longevity and endurance, and are frequent subjects in art. Pine-tree forms are often represented with foliage in cumulus-like shapes arranged in horizontal layers and slender vertical trunks. These are about the ‘essence’ of the trees rather than individual trees or places; their apparent effortlessness shows a reality quite unlike that seen in the works of European painters. Pine trees can be seen in scroll paintings and on lacquer and ceramics. Hamamatsu, representations of Japanese black pines by the shore, are especially striking. The theme is thought to have emerged over a thousand years ago in the Heian period (794–1185). A particularly beautiful example in the National Museum of Australia dates from about 1550. The trees spread from right to centre left, irregular but repeating forms floating across gold leaf. A band of blue across the lower centre represents the sea, with two small white boats balancing a group of horses depicted among the trees. The work is as sophisticated – and considerably more peaceful than – Botticelli’s Decameron scenes set amid the Ravenna pines, but both tell truths about the trees, their tranquillity, shapes and enduring indifference to the transient world of humans. Stylized representations of pine trees on folding screens in turn have influenced real trees that have been trained to represent the shapes portrayed by the screen artists.23
Hokusai Katsushika, Komatsubiki (Gathering Young Pine), 1804–07, woodcut. Picking young pine trees was considered an auspicious act in ancient Japanese belief.
Hasegawa Tohaku, The Forest of Pines, 16th century, ink on paper. Artists in China and Japan were fascinated by the appearance of pine trees in mist long before Europeans began representing such scenes. This Japanese example is on a pair of folding screens.
Gardeners in the Far East have made by far the most striking uses of pines in horticulture. Lacebark pines have long been a feature of Chinese temple courtyards. With age, their bark becomes a gleaming white, visible from a long way off, and individual trees are esteemed for their age, beauty and the shade they give. Zhang Zhu, a Yuan Dynasty poet, wrote about this tree:
Its pine needles as fine
As silver hairpins, . . .
By the temple, in misty rain,
It appears as a tall white dragon.24
The Chinese were also the originators of penjing, the art of growing trees in restricted spaces so that although they are mature in shape they are dwarfed in stature. This is better known to Westerners under the Japanese name of bonsai, where the numerous pine tree forms show in miniatures, such as Japanese white pines with tiny needles upturned in bunches, the trunk carefully and gracefully trained in a zigzag series of 45-degree angles, or, in contrast, Japanese black pine, very squat with a trunk at once tiny and massive, the roots curving out to grasp the soil and the upturned branches bearing tufts of (relatively) long needles.
Japanese gardens are inextricably linked to the country’s landscapes, religious beliefs and aesthetics, and they are full of pines to the extent that these can be regarded as the tree type that defines them.25 Niwaki pines (garden trees grown through a process of pruning and shaping, sometimes called ‘cloud pruning’ in English) are skillfully trained to produce a cultural artefact ‘coaxing out those features believed to signify “the essence of the tree”: gnarled trunks, outstretched branches, rounded canopies’.26
Niwaki-trained pines are a feature of Ritsurin-koen, formerly a private garden but now a public park.
It is the pines . . . which that make this garden exceptional – they are everywhere you look, clustered together on islands, scrambling up slopes, forming long, caterpillar-like hedges, framing views and leaning out over ponds.27
Skilled perspective tricks with rocks, gravel and mounds make 1.5-m-high pines appear like tall mountain trees when viewed from a distance. Curves or kinks are induced in the trunks, and lower branches are removed and upper ones trained to be straight and horizontal, or into zigzags.
Patterns relating to pine trees are also frequent in Japanese textiles. Some are direct transfers of landscape painting techniques onto silk garments, while others show stylized pine patterns such as glittery winter scenes on black, or firework-like explosions of bunches of long needles leaving branches. Simple prints show matsuba – pine needles – in pairs just as they appear on the forest floor. A similar pattern is found in sashiko (a type of white-on-indigo stitching). A set of colours is used to represent pine trees on printed fabrics, principally deep greens, orange and rusty-red. Woven textiles display sophisticated patterns, including damask-type techniques; an example of a geisha’s obi (wide kimono belt) displays the ends of branches showing buds against whorls of leaves, executed in pale gold damask weave on cream silk.28 For those who had to suffer the mid-twentieth-century English use of ‘pine’ or ‘forest’ – dull, dark green – for school uniforms, they are a revelation.
In North America, much of the pre-Columbian symbolism relating to pine trees has either been lost or still lies buried in notes made by ethnographers. Colorado pinyon was an important part of the indigenous culture. In a gesture that recalls Japanese traditions of relating young children to sapling pines, Apache mothers would place the cradleboards of their children in the east sides of young pinyons, saying to a tree, ‘Here is the baby carrier. I give this to you, still young and growing. I want my child to grow up as you do.’ The Navajo followed a similar custom, although it was a dead child’s cradleboard that was placed in the tree, with the cradle laces of a healthy child. Male initiation ceremonies involved placing ritual items in young pinyon pines. Their burning pitch provided incense, and ceremonial wands were made from branches selected from the cardinal points.29
Modern Western pine symbolism cannot match Far Eastern or ancient European myth for vivid imagery, and relates more to the economic importance of pines and their part in the natural world. A pine cone (from a Roman stone original) has long been a symbol for Augsburg (Bavaria), on seals for bolts of cloth, and as a silver mark, but the use of pine trees in colonial culture in North America is more clearly related to politics and trade. They appear on coins from New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on state flags, and also as a pattern in quilting. The Vermont state seal bears the likeness of a pine tree with fourteen branches representing the original thirteen counties plus Vermont. Eastern white pine is the official tree of Maine, ‘the pine-tree state’, and appears on the state seal and the state flag, adopted because of an abundance of timber for shipbuilding in colonial times. The official state tree of Alabama is the longleaf pine, adopted in 1997.
In North America, an alternative method of exploring the forms and landscapes of pine trees produced some of the most beautiful and enduring images. Photography brought to the public consciousness both the scale of industrial logging, in hundreds of newspaper and publicity photographs, and the sublime landscape of the American southwest. The Yosemite Valley was especially important, a subject for photography as early as 1861, when Carleton Watkins carried his heavy plate camera into the mountains and began photographing scenery and treescapes. The images he made were exhibited in New York in 1862 and were a major factor in legislation signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, which effectively made the valley a national park, securing it as a public amenity, unavailable to mining and logging companies.30
Colour lithograph after a painting by Andrew Melrose, c. 1887, Yosemite Valley from Mariposa Trail. Exploration of the granite scenery and conifer forests of Yosemite Valley in California by people of European origin began in the 1850s. Artists, poets, photographers and early environmentalists were all fascinated by the area.
These photographs were precursors of the work of Ansel Adams (1902–1984), who was famous for his photographs of the area. His black-and-white images of sky, water and spectacular mountains, and his detailed studies, including many of pines, helped to shape a view of Yosemite. Close-ups show subjects such as the ends of pine-tree boughs, their needles as slender black fans emerging from a mass of snow, pine cones, and the grain of worn and twisted dead trees that have lost their bark. More distant views place the trees in their forest environment, as tangled, snow-laden boughs against other trees, open tree crowns in massive mountain landscapes, weather-worn trunks whose tough verticality contrasts with the apparent softness of white water spilling over a massive fall, or spires spilling down glaciated valleys. Adams plays with perspective, making pines of the typical conifer shape seem taller than the conical mountain that appears behind them, or picturing a tree in the foreground melting into a row of other pines high on a distant ledge. At times they are small, dark isosceles triangles, whose curving distribution across a sweep of dipping mountainside emphasizes the spectacular geology of Yosemite.31
The bristlecone pines seem to be the ones that have most fascinated the Western world recently. Michael Cohen considers their aesthetics in A Garden of Bristlecones; he discusses how age and weather, especially winds laden with snow and particles of sand, have shaped the wood of these ancient trees.
Aesthetic qualities of groves and individuals are created by the prevailing wind, which is also the direction from which the light flows. On a bright morning when they seem created by light, this is not an illusion. . . .Wind, cold and light seem to conspire at timberline, creating a certain order among trees.32
Cohen comments how the individual trees seem alike but different at the same time, how light on the dead wood attracts photographers, so that they miss the fact that the lee sides of the trees are often a mass of foliage, whose surface presents an evenness that is problematic for the artist, as is tension between ‘complexity and abstraction’ when the trees are viewed from a distance. In a meditation on the forms of the trees in their differing environments (there are several groves, on differing rock formations), his wife considers their forms, their horizontals, verticals and curves as seen from a distance and close to, and their overall conical form together with differences in light values between lit wood, shadows and dark foliage.
Contemporary attitudes to bristlecone pines seem to reflect something of the Far Eastern respect for the longevity of pines. Cohen remarks how a sense that cutting down a bristlecone is a sin became common in the 1990s, the debate seeming to relate to the significance of the wood that has ‘acquired importance beyond curiosity’.33 A combination of their intriguing visual appearance combined with awe for their great age (perhaps particularly important in a country whose colonial history is short and which has cut down vast numbers of ancient trees) seems to be at work here.