05 december 2022
my walk home from the metro station every day brings me by a florist's shop in my street. the plants that are arranged there are different every day, though sometimes a shrub will be brought in and out of the shop for days, unable to find a buyer. but i digress. tonight, as i walked home, i caught the smell of conifers, of spruce needles;
at first i wondered what it was, but then out of nowhere a grove of small, tidy, portable christmas trees (of indeterminate species: not that i don't care about it, but that their function is so much more "valuable" in the cities than their nature, kinship and nativity) sprung up engulfing a small section of the sidewalk. dressed (rather tied) in white plastic netting, they seemed corseted, carrying within the viscose lace the promise of lush, thick, ample branches, waiting to unfold by themselves to reach a state somewhat similar to that which they had silently stood in, circulating watery sap, in the strange fake forest where they were planted with the express and single purpose of growing to adolescence (these are not the spruces which have grown adult and rise higher than haussmannian buildings) and being chopped down, and quartered, and sold. it is strange to walk in a city street enbalmed by the oils of evergreen trees; stranger still, though banal now, is the sight of this arboricole youth, raised in a province with an encrypted name, dressed in Chinese plastic, standing on a Parisian street.
but to most, to the florist, it is just a product, perhaps imbued with some presupposed beauty.
another time, not too far from there, i smelled the smell of humus, and mycelium, and mushrooms as we smelled in the country, after rainy nights. of course, the bitumen had fruited neither cep nor chanterelle, and the smell must have been imported, like that of the trees, from outside the city limits. for nothing grows here, but only is transformed. what could i have been?
do forests grow in the cities? surely it is the other way around, but maybe not for long.
Nowadays, the Christmas tree ('le sapin de Noël') is a farm culture in its own right, the production methods of which closely
approach those of grapevine or of small fruits such as currant.
-- association française du sapin de noël naturel