Saint Beech

In this excerpt from a forthcoming book, noted nature writer and scholar John Elder ’69 reflects upon the bond between forests and humankind.

An excerpt from Vallombrosa: The Shadowed Path to Stewardship, by John Elder ’69

On a mild December afternoon, several weeks after our visit to the Vallombrosa arboretum, Rita and I stood beside an ancient beech in the forest above the abbey. Its solid gray bark had the characteristic scoured texture we recognized from Vermont. But much more massive branches than we were used to seeing on a beech undulated out and up in their centuries-long dance with the filtered light. A stone wall shored up the embankment where the beech was rooted, while a small chapel stood nearby. Inside the chapel hung a portrait of San Giovanni Gualberto. The altar before his picture was covered by petitions of the faithful, written on scraps of paper and held down by pebbles, fragments of wood, chestnut burs. One close to the front asked for the gifts of “salute e serenit”—health and serenity.

The journey that brought Giovanni Gualberto to Vallombrosa began on a Good Friday. He was riding his horse up the hill from Florence to attend Mass at the Church of San Miniato when he came upon the man who had killed his brother. The murderer begged for mercy with his arms outstretched in imitation of the Crucified One. And the young aristocrat forgave him, violating every expectation of his class and era. As he continued into the basilica for worship, he passed a fresco where Christ bowed his head in approval of his actions. Within several months, Giovanni had overcome the opposition of his father to become a member of the Benedictine community there at San Miniato. But just a few years after that he was lucky to escape with his own life, fleeing the wrath of Florence’s Bishop whom he had denounced for electing a corrupt man as the monastery’s new Abbot. The Vallombrosian order of Benedictines, which was subsequently founded by this refugee to the mountains, would be devoted both to contemplation and to reforming monastic life and the Church itself. And the new community’s spiritual energy would soon be widely recognized and supported. In 1039 Giovanni Gualberto received the surrounding forests as a gift to the monastery, and a beautiful stone church was completed and consecrated at Vallombrosa in 1058.

When the young Florentine first arrived in this rugged terrain, though, he had neither patrons, a clear sense of mission, nor even the necessities of food and shelter. Another significant event in the story thus relates to his finding protection from the elements below a beech that interlaced its branches over his head to keep him dry and warm. For centuries now, a chapel has commemorated this act of compassion by the Faggio Santo, or Holy Beech. In the English translation included within one guidebook we purchased at the Abbey, the honored tree was referred to simply as Saint Beech. The ancient specimen rooted here now is considered by the monks to be the third successor in a direct line from the original protector of San Giovanni Gualberto. Leonardo, the uniformed Vallombrosa forester who brought us to see this current incarnation of the Faggio Santo, remarked in a matter-of-fact way, “It’s the same every year. This beech always gets its new spring leaves earlier than any other beech in the forest.”

Further donations followed the original bequest of land. By the end of the 13th century the Abbey’s property stretched from the confluence of the Vicana and Arno Rivers all the way up to the summit of Monte Secchieta—several thousand acres in all. By that point, the monks had already established a tradition of careful forestry anticipating the best practices of sustainability in our own day. They pursued single-stem selection rather than allowing whole hillsides to be cut; in their planting, as well, they held forest-diversity to be a prime criterion; and they coordinated all of their efforts with local farmers and furniture makers, developing a value-added economy that kept villages in their region considerably more prosperous than most communities in Tuscany. The Vallombrosian monks were twice expelled from their Abbey and forest—first for a few years under Napoleon and then again for over a century when Church lands were expropriated after the 1861 unification of Italy. They were finally allowed to move back into their Abbey in the 1960s, though the forest itself has remained both a publicly managed Riserva Naturale and a field station for Italy’s only state forestry school. During the Fascist era there were some massive clear cuts at Vallombrosa, as well as significant damage to the woods right around the Abbey from bombing in the final years of the war. Still, the forest as a whole has remained one of the most beautiful, diverse, and culturally prestigious in Italy. Its designation today as a Riserva Naturale perpetuates a tradition of reciprocal protection between trees and human beings that was inaugurated by the Faggio Santo almost a thousand years ago. And Giovanni Gualberto continues to be recognized in Italy today as the Patron Saint of forests.

The story of San Giovanni Gualberto and the Holy Beech is colored by a medieval piety that feels remote from our own world, yet that may have much to teach us about conservation. In fact, being able to listen respectfully to such stories may help those of us who consider ourselves environmentalists to find a more comprehensive and adequate land-ethic. The American conservation movement has focused on wilderness from the time of John Muir through the career of David Brower. In my mind, the wilderness ethic represents a breakthrough in our thinking—an affirmation of nature’s value, and its sacredness, transcending the narrow calculus of “natural resources” and human utility. It represents one of America’s greatest contributions to world culture. But the initial strategy of separation—drawing boundaries beyond which roads, mechanized transport and permanent dwellings are not allowed—needs now to be integrated more fully into our other practices on the land. It is not that such a strategy has been wrong in itself. The Wilderness Act of 1964, the Alaskan Wilderness Bill and the Eastern Wild Areas Act have all been triumphs for American conservation, and the exclusions described above have been necessary for the preservation of such extraordinary lands. But we are called upon to take a further step, and to uphold higher standards in the lands outside the boundaries of wilderness, where we do live and work. While continuing to focus on the forests, we need to cultivate a spirit of gratitude toward individual trees.

Rita and I have raised our family in the village of Bristol, Vermont, sheltered under the heavily wooded ridge of the Green Mountains that runs from Mt. Abraham to Camel’s Hump. We celebrate the resurgence of these Vermont forests over the past two centuries, as well as the increasing diversity of animal life that makes our state so much wilder in important ways than at at any time since the Civil War. But such an ecological recovery has another side. In the mid-nineteenth century almost all of the food and fiber consumed in Vermont came from within the state’s borders. Our houses and furniture came from the trees of our own woodlots, just as the energy to heat those houses did, and our clothes were often spun from the wool of our own flocks. But today, when these mountains are so much less ravaged, we also import an overwhelming proportion of our energy—in the form of oil, natural gas and hydro-power from Quebec. Much of our food is grown in places like California, New Jersey, Ohio and Florida now. Even our houses and their furnishings include quite a bit of wood from elsewhere. I do not intend to argue for a new isolationism. But the fact remains that the rewilding of our forests is part of a larger pattern. The increasing greenness of a beautiful place like Vermont reflects the degree to which we have become implicated in the industrial agriculture practiced far from our borders, in the clear-cutting of the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon rainforest and Indonesia, and in the manufacturing carried out at low wages throughout the developing world. It’s important for us to bear this whole picture in mind, but hard to do so. We need daily, visible reminders of the true environmental costs of our lifestyles, as well as local sources of inspiration for a more mindful and modest way of life. Both in the preservation of wilderness and the conservation of sustainably managed forests, we need to remember the holiness of individual trees. …

I picked up a brittle beech leaf from beside the Cappella. It was different from ours in Vermont—smaller, rounder, browner and stiffer than the beech leaves I was used to. And it was already on the ground when ours at home would still be bleaching and rattling on their twigs, even though the surrounding deciduous trees, except for a few red oaks, would have lost their own leaves. Still, this was recognizably a beech leaf, with its fish shape and its little spines at the end of every vein. It was a reminder, from one forest to another, of the holy bond that sancitifies trees in our minds and ordains us all as inheritors of the forest.