Berit Glanz Saplings and Forests

How do plants shape our culture and history? Berit Glanz explores oaks and lindens, connects Germany, Sweden and Iceland and maps the global journeys of flowers and trees. A poetic reflection on nature, memory, and identity.

Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur)

Plants don’t care about borders; they don’t care about our stories or the meanings we attach to their leaves and flowers. Plants care about good soil that meets their needs, clean air, water and sunlight. A plant’s song must be sung in many voices and for a long time before it can acquire symbolic significance. In the United States, many states have their own official flower, vegetable and dessert – but how many people living there really know that Washington and Vermont share the apple as their “state fruit”, or that the ice-cream cone is Missouri’s official dessert? You can declare a plant, flower or tree to be a national symbol, but whether it becomes culturally meaningful is another matter.

The twinflower, a small evergreen shrub with paired pale pink flowers, is not native to the islands of the North Atlantic, even though “borealis” in its botanical name, Linnaea borealis, suggests a northern origin. Plants have many names: the common ones we use in everyday life, like when we come across a patch of dark green undergrowth dotted with pink flowers, and the scientific-sounding ones, which teach us more about them, such as the fact that the twinflower originates from the North. This little flower is cherished in Sweden, even though it lost a public vote to the round-leaved, violet-blue harebell (Campanula rotundifolia), which has been Sweden’s national flower since 2021.

The country where I was born has no national flower, but it has adopted a tree – the pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) – as a symbol. Although never officially declared a national emblem in Germany, its historical significance is undeniable, as reflected in the oak leaves that appear in various official emblems and on coins. When I was a child, before the euro was introduced, the 50-pfennig coin depicted a woman kneeling down to plant an oak sapling, the soft curves of her body almost sensuously outlined beneath her dress. It wasn’t until years later as an adult that I understood the image. As a child, I was convinced the woman was a farmer pulling carrots from the soil.

Long obsessed with their forests, the people of Germany have celebrated the oak for centuries. It is ironic that a poet named Eichendorff (which literally means “oak village”) once wrote of the “land of the oaks”. Even today, German children are brought up to play with wooden toys and encouraged to go for walks in the forest rather than watch television. Yet, oaks are far less common in Germany than copper beeches, and the largest oak by trunk circumference stands not in Germany but in Sweden: the Rumskullaeken, believed to be over a thousand years old, in Norra Kvill National Park in Småland.

The power of national symbols to bring people together – and shut others out – became clear in the case of the Germans and their oak forests. Soon after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, signs appeared forbidding Jews from entering the “German Forest”. During this period, “Hitler oaks” were planted across the country, many of which remained standing long after the war. It was not until the 1990s that aerial photographs revealed a swastika shape in a Brandenburg forest – formed by larch trees planted among pines, their golden autumn leaves standing out against the dark green. This swastika of trees was not an isolated case in Germany. Again and again, large-scale plantings in the shape of swastikas had to be removed from German forests.

When the design for the 50-pfennig coin was commissioned in the postwar year of 1948, the Bank Deutscher Länder (a central bank established to serve West Germany) sought a politically neutral image. The selection committee was immediately won over by sculptor Richard Martin Werner’s depiction of a woman planting a tree: the oak sapling was meant to symbolise the nation’s reconstruction and also pay tribute to the “Kulturfrauen”. While “Trümmerfrauen”, or rubble women, cleared away the debris from bombed German cities, the Kulturfrauen worked to replant and restore Germany’s war-ravaged forests. Yet neither the oak nor the German forest had remained politically neutral or untouched by Nazi ideology in the years before, even if the silver coin refused to admit this legacy. As though a sapling could somehow detach itself from the history of its own tree lineage.

In Iceland, the country where I now live, there are very few forests, even though reforestation projects are in full swing. Icelanders debate the rapidly expanding coniferous forests that are altering the lava landscape, the lupins introduced to curb erosion and the balsam poplars planted since the mid-20th century. Determining which plants are truly native, which new species should be welcomed and which historical landscapes should be preserved is no simple task. Before the Vikings settled the island a thousand years ago, birch forests interspersed with rowan and woolly willow covered roughly half of the North Atlantic island. However, sheep farming, erosion and timber harvesting quickly led to its near-total deforestation. Today, the question remains: should the Iceland of the future be the treeless lava island, or the forested land that existed before the Vikings arrived.

Small-Leaved Lime (Tilia cordata)

There are trees in many places that locals claim have stood there for over a thousand years. While most of these trees haven’t actually occupied their spots for a full millennium, they are entwined with so many stories and memories that to the people around them, they feel at least a thousand years old. Lime blossoms emit a honeyed fragrance and attract bees. In the evenings and at night, sticky nectar drips from the flowers. Lime trees can live for a very long time, and some in Europe are so old they have even been given names of their own.

Not far from Ingemar Bengtsson’s farmhouse in Stegeryd, near Vittaryd in Småland, there once stood an old lime tree with a three-part trunk. When Ingemar’s son Nils wanted to go to university in Lund, he had to choose a new surname, because his patronymic name, “Nils Ingemarsson” was not accepted. Nils recalled the mighty lime tree of his childhood and chose the name Linnæus, Latinising the southern Swedish dialect word “Linn” for lime – a compromise between the tree of his origins and the Latin requirements of his future. He was not the only member of his family to draw inspiration from the lime tree. His cousins adopted the surnames Tiliander and Lindelius, also referencing the tree from their homeland. Allegedly, the lime was carefully tended and cared for so that no branch would die, because it was closely associated with the three families Linnæus, Tiliander and Lindelius. Whether this lime truly existed – or still exists – I do not know. I have only found its story in books. At least I can be sure that the paper on which I read about the three-trunked tree was not made from its wood, as lime is not well-suited to papermaking.

The name Linnæus was passed down as a family name to the next generation, first to the eldest son, Carl, who also inherited the patronym Nilsson. Carl Nilsson Linnæus grew up in a century when the world seemed explorable and measurable – a time when even magic could be captured in concepts. In this era of classification, he set about organising the living world, devising boxes and cases, lineages and family resemblances that would become the foundation of modern taxonomy. Naming, describing, classifying – once his own nature was ordered, even the farthest reaches of the world could be charted. In the summer of 1739, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm was founded. England, France and Prussia already had their scientific academies; it was time for a Swedish counterpart, and Carl was among its founding members.

Carl’s eldest daughter, Elisabeth Christina, had taken an early interest in the plants her father so meticulously classified. She was perhaps his best student, certainly more skilled than her brother Carl, who not only inherited their father’s name, but was also destined to continue his academic legacy at Uppsala. When their father named the nasturtium in his book Species Plantarum, establishing the modern binomial nomenclature for plants, he was still known as Carl Nilsson Linnæus. In 1761, the Swedish king officially ennobled him, prompting him to adopt the name Linné. The family crest of the newly ennobled family drew inspiration from nature, its tripartite design symbolising the realms of minerals, plants and animals that Linné had catalogued in his Systema Naturae. At the centre of the family crest sat an egg, above it the twinflower named after Linné.

The nasturtium appears nowhere on the family crest, even though it was to play a key role in the family’s botanical research. Carl von Linné had named the genus of nasturtiums Tropaeolum, which had been brought to Europe from South America two centuries earlier. In the binomial nomenclature, the capitalised genus name is combined with the lowercase species name. This is why the large nasturtium is called Tropaeolum majus. The botanical name of the plant still carries the author abbreviation “L.”, a reference to its name-giver.

The nasturtium likely arrived in Europe in the 16th century, by which time Iceland’s landscapes were already deforested and oak forests had grown on the mainland for centuries. Traces of the plant appear repeatedly in the records of naturalists. It was given different names, its flavour and fragrance described, and its likeness carefully illustrated. Yet it was Elisabeth Christina who, during the long summer evenings at her father’s estate in Hammarby, observed the flowers in the soft light of the summer dusk.

In 1762, Elisabeth Christina published her essay “Om Indianska krassens blickande” at the Royal Swedish Academy, describing her observation that the orange-red flowers of the nasturtium seemed to emit lightning-like flashes. After its publication, difficult years followed for Elisabeth Christina. Her husband, Major Bergencrantz, was so violent that she eventually fled back to her parents’ estate. There, at least, the nasturtiums still appeared to flash in the twilight. In her old home, she still had the solace of nature and the garden – the intricate structure of the blossoms and the order of plants.

The name “Indianska krassen” reflected the non-European origin of the plant, which soon spread across Europe. Other researchers also became intrigued by the observed light phenomenon. Romantic writers in Germany and England were particularly fascinated by the image of the flashing nasturtiums. Elisabeth herself suggested that the flashes likely occurred in the eye of the observer rather than in the flower – a theory not confirmed until much later. The human eye adapts to the shades of grey in twilight through the rods in the retina, which are specialised for detecting light and dark. The bright orange petals stimulate the cones responsible for colour vision so suddenly that they create the illusion of flashes. The unexpected experience makes the flowers appear to light up.

Years ago, when my grandmother’s dementia was already advanced, we once sat together with her care group. Once a month, family members were invited to share a meal with the residents. That day, the cook had made a special effort and decorated the plates with nasturtium flowers. Many of the elderly people were puzzled that the flowers were there not just for decoration. We had to coax my grandmother for some time before she finally put one in her mouth. Since then, the bright orange flowers have always reminded me of that evening. I was also delighted when my child brought home a self-grown nasturtium from school. But the Icelandic summer was too bright for the flowers to produce the flashing effect: we slept under the midnight sun and missed the brief twilight period in the middle of the night – the moment when the flashes would have appeared.

Sweet Chestnut (Castania sativa)

The white mountain avens (Dryas octopetala) does not flash in the dark. Its small, white flowers form carpets over barren landscapes, and the shrub’s long shoots spread across the ground in a lattice-like pattern. In the Arctic, when the sun barely sets and the night brings only a dim twilight rather than darkness, the white mountain avens blooms. This hardy plant thrives on Iceland’s lava fields and rocky barrens. In 2004, Icelanders chose it as their national flower, and it has also been designated a floral emblem in Lapland and Canada’s Northwest Territories. The little shrub and its blossoms seem to touch something in the hearts of the people in the Arctic Circle, who see the flowers in bloom only for a brief season. To survive there, a plant must be resilient, ideally forming a symbiotic relationship with a fungus that ensures a steady supply of moisture. In this way, it can live for a hundred years.

The oldest flower in Europe is conceivably the dog rose (Rosa canina), although this is impossible to verify. Somewhere, perhaps in a distant urban backyard, an even older plant could exist, and some varieties can continually renew themselves through shoots while retaining the same genetic makeup. The dog rose of Hildesheim, however, has been linked to legends of the “rose miracle” for centuries. It is said to be a thousand years old, though it may be closer to just eight hundred. In any case, it is undoubtedly ancient. When the rose was burned and buried under rubble during a 1945 bombing, it was considered a miracle that the plant produced new shoots some time later. Perhaps the Hildesheim dog rose would have been a more fitting symbol of postwar renewal than the oak saplings on the 50-pfennig coin.

A hedge rose is far harder to embrace than a tree. The age of a rose cannot be measured in arm’s lengths. Few plants display their centuries as proudly as a tree, however trees can deceive us too, like the Hildesheim rose. Many trees send up new shoots from their ancient rootstocks, so the small tree above ground often belies the millennia-old network below. One of Europe’s oldest trees is Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce (Picea abies) in Sweden. The visible tree in Dalarna is over five hundred years old, yet its root system, from which it grows, dates back nearly ten thousand years – a Neolithic spruce.

Some plants appear young despite their great age, while others seem ancient, as if they have always been part of the landscape, yet are actually recent arrivals to Europe’s latitudes. Nasturtiums, for example, are often considered native, but they have been in Europe for less than five hundred years. They are so-called neophytes – species introduced by humans to new geographical regions. Plants introduced before 1500, prior to Europe’s first expeditions to the Americas, are called archaeophytes. The sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) is one such example, brought here from the Mediterranean by the Romans. Humans bring not only themselves and their habits into new lands, but also their plants, reshaping landscapes and creating new stories about the flora that surrounds them.

Hallormsstaðaskógur is Iceland’s largest forest. Since 1903, researchers have studied which trees can thrive in the North Atlantic. Today, the forest is home to sixty-five species from six hundred regions worldwide. Some are neophytes, introduced only in recent centuries; others are archaeophytes, long established in European landscapes. However, such distinctions probably make little sense on an island straddling the boundary of the American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Together, all these trees – old and new – form the largest forest on what was once a treeless island. The global network of plants and trees, the cross-border care of vegetation and interest in cultivating new life in foreign or native soil – all of this, the century-long project of a garden or forest – are surely among the most remarkable realised utopias in human history.