Almanegra
Alto de Ventanas is home to the last surviving examples of a species that was, until recently, completely unknown. Inside the trunk of these magnolias, in their dark wood, you can see the relationships, the trials and tribulations of one of the world’s oldest and most inspirational plants.
This is the story of a tree. The story of one in more than three billion – according to recent calculations, that’s almost ten times the number of stars lighting up the milky way. It is the story of just one tree, but that doesn’t make it any less important.
The tree, this tree, measures around 28 metres. Nobody can say how old it is, but those in the know tell us that it looks to be between 150 and 200 years old. It has a number 2 painted in yellow and a stripe the same colour wrapped around its bark, ridged like the skin of a reptile. Its trunk, somewhere between ash and pink, it is shaped like a scimitar, and about 90 centimetres in diameter – enough to make it impossible to wrap your arms around it. Hundreds of bromeliads, ferns and green and browns mosses grow clinging to its bark. They climb from the ground to the only four branches that form his sparse crown.
The tree painted with a yellow number 2 is in a pasture in Alto de Ventanas, a mountainous area near Yarumal in Antioquia. It sits alone on a steep hillside in the middle of a landscape that was, until a century ago, home to a dense cloud forest. Patches of vegetation rise up around it, along with muddy paths hollowed out by cattle.
It doesn’t have its own name, because nobody gives a tree its own name, but in the last hundred years it has been known as the magnolia of the mountain, or purple buzzard. If anyone were to cut its trunk, as soon as the white wood in the middle were exposed to oxygen, it would turn black as ebony. That’s how it gets its other names: Almanegra de las Ventanas, or simply Almanegra, meaning ‘black soul. The botanical records that identify it include it in the Magnoliaceae family, in the Magnolia genus, and in a species known as Magnolia polyhypsophylla.
This tree is one of the last survivors in its class. Today it is one of 37 in the world, according to the people who keep records of these things. That means it is less common than a Fabergé egg, a Gutenberg bible, or a person with over $20 billion to their name. If it depended only on the number of individual specimens, it would be harder to find than a Javan rhino, an Amur leopard, or a western Cross River gorilla, three of the most endangered mammals on Earth. It is rarer than a western underground orchid, one of the rarest plants on the planet; the corpse flower, one of the tallest and weirdest in the world; or the jellyfish tree, a species that is only found in three tiny, remote spots in the Seychelles. And yet, its indisputable rarity isn’t even the most important thing about this tree. Or it shouldn’t be.
That’s what I thought when I saw it on a farm beside a nature reserve in November 2019, four months after my first trip to Yarumal in search of an Almanegra. It had a wound on its trunk caused by bacteria, around twelve metres above ground level, half way to its branches. A hole in the bark dripped streams of black water, a sign that it was probably rotten on the inside. Due to its age and condition, the trunk had developed problems bearing the weight of the crown and withstanding the gusts of wind that ravaged it every day. While it was still standing, in all probability, it would soon be dead.
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“I want to tell what the forests were like”, wrote W.S. Merwin, a prize-winning New York poet who dedicated part of his life to tending palms in danger of extinction. “I will have to speak in a forgotten language”. We are accustomed to trees. We see them as an unchanging feature of any landscape. A smudge of green and brown as old as the Earth itself that will stay in place as the backdrop to century after century. Not only is that image wrong, it could even be dangerous. Trees and forests are a relatively recent development: an evolutionary epiphany that, because of their current predominance, seem to have existed forever – the same way some people think about our presence on the planet.
Angiosperms, the first plants with flowers, developed 85 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years after the first dinosaurs appeared, and over 400 million years after the first molluscs. This means that, proportionally speaking, if the Earth had existed for just one day, flowers would have been a part of it for just the last 40 minutes.
Magnoliaceae, the family of the almanegra de Ventanas, were the first to flower. They are close relatives of the Anonaceae, the soursop family, and the laureaceae, the cumin family. And they have a family history that deserves its own section in the biography.
In 2017, a study determined the most likely shape of the first flower - because they are so delicate, fossils of plants are extremely rare. According to the authors, this one had oval white petals, arranged in groups of three around a set of stamens and pistils, the male and female parts of a flower. This description could apply to the flowers of a Magnolia grandiflora, the tree that most people think of when they hear the word magnolia.
Magnoliaceae are extremely resilient plants. The cockroaches of the plant world. They survived the meteorite they say caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and three quarters of the plant and animal species on the planet, the continental drift, and the Eocene global temperature rise. According to one of its possible origin stories – because like every family, it has several – they migrated away from the excessive heat to Europe via Greenland, and from there they spread into northern Asia. Trees can’t walk, so they rely on the wind, birds and an army of land animals to sow their seeds and occupy new territories. Later they survived glaciation by escaping to lower latitudes. During the Cenozoic ice age, the period when the Antarctic ice cap was formed, European Magnoliaceae species became extinct and varieties around the world diversified in ways that enabled them to move south, in search of warmer climates. Another theory is that they originally came from China, and moved across the Bering Strait to North America and then to the tropics. Another turns the tables, locating their place of birth in the tropics, and maps their journey from the south towards the seasonal climates of the north.
In America, according to two of the theories, the family travelled by bird flight from the United States to some of the Caribbean islands, Central America, and across the Darien Gap to the Andes. At some point, long before the first humans arrived in the area, their Andean journey stopped in the middle of the Cordillera Central, in a rainy area, nourished directly by the clouds, now known as Alto de Ventanas.
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The tree, our tree, has a tangled history. Despite its advanced age, we only discovered the existence of the species around 20 years ago. This ignorance is partly down to geographic factors, but it’s also related to our own blindness. It was part of the forest and the forest is made up of group of trees indistinguishable to most human eyes. This partly explains why the almanegra de Ventanas was only described for the first time at the end of the last century.
On 22 November 1978, at La Flota farm, not far from Yarumal, botanist Gustavo Lozano stumbled upon an unknown tree around 30 metres tall. In his life, Lozano, a lecturer at the Natural Sciences Institute at Colombia’s National University, detailed over 75 new plant species, including almost all the Magnoliaceae that exist in Colombia. Lozano, who died in 2000, was particularly fond of this ancient family of flowering plants. He had described half a dozen new Magnolia species when he came across this tree with light brown bark, “lime green with a hint of red wine” and cream coloured flowers. Most probably, this was a magnolia undocumented by science, an opportunity to name and describe a new variety.
Certifying a new species requires, in the simplest of cases, a morphological study of the leaves, flowers and fruit. This therefore requires samples to be taken from a small branch exhibiting these parts. Botanists take samples, press them and stick them in boxes that are then kept in herbaria – natural history museums for the scientific study of flora – accompanied by information about the plant, place of collection and people who found it.
Meticulous analysis of the parts of the plant is essential, because, as with animals, the difference between a known species and an unknown one depends on features invisible to the naked eye, or to the eye of someone standing on the ground. This is why botanists interested in trees carry telescopic shears that allow them to reach and cut high branches.
That day, in 1978, standing in front of the new tree, Lozano had a problem. Everything pointed to this being a new species. He could tell just from looking at a leaf on the ground. Magnolia leaves grow protected by a little hood called a stipule. Once the leaves are ready, the stipules drop off, leaving behind a tiny scar. This kind of magnolia, which used to be known as Talauma (recent genetic studies grouped all the old genera under Magnolia), the hood leaves a scar on the stem and on the leaves. And the magnolia Lozano found himself looking at – it wasn’t hard to tell– belonged to this genus, although it had an unusual feature.
This tree had flowers pointing downwards, like some kind of bell, which is very strange for a magnolia. Their flowers usually open to the sky, in a chalice shape. It had six, thick, creamy yellow petals. It was hanging from a long stem marked by almost a dozen whitish rings, scars left by its bracts, the modified leaves that enclose the flower as it grows. It was an unusual plant and Lozano needed a branch, ideally one with flowers and fruit, at any cost.
His unorthodox and rather questionable solution is perhaps emblematic of the times: Lozano, according to the stories told by the older generation in the region, asked Eduardo Restrepo, a local farm worker known as El Mampiro, who sometimes acted as his guide, to chop down the whole tree to get the branch, the fruit and the flower. The tree, the only one of its kind to be recorded at that time, fell for the good of science, and Lozano took all the branches he could possibly need. From there, he recorded all the necessary information in the specimen file, which effectively made it a new species for science: Talauma polyhypsophylla, now Magnolia polyhypsophylla (poly: many; hypsophylla: hypsophylla or bracts). Back in Bogotá, he archived the file in the National Herbarum, where it can still be consulted to this day.
Almost 20 years later, a group of botanists took on the task of looking for more trees in the same species, based on this file. At first they didn’t find any. Not in Yarumal, not in Antioquia in general, there were no almanegras de Ventanas to be seen. According to Román Restrepo, a 66-year-old farm worker who has lived in the region since he was a boy, the species of tree painted with the yellow number 2 was fairly common at the start of the previous century. His father and other locals used its wood to build houses. They made it into beams due to its density and strength. According to Román’s mother, many of the almanegras were cut down when the Rio Grande dam was built in 1941. At that time, selling wood became a lucrative business for the people of Yarumal. Plots of land was bought just to saw wood. Teams of twenty oxen left Alto de Ventanas for the dam. “There, with the ordinary wood, there was everything: almanegra, yellow laurel, cumin, lasiandra”, Román tells me. Any trunk would fetch a good price.
After the logging for the dam construction, the remaining forest was reduced further by dairy farming, the main economic activity for farm workers in the region. Most of the trees were cut down to create pasture, a common phenomenon. Cloud forests were among the worst affected. In Colombia, according to a study by the National University, only 25% of this kind of forest remains. And in Alto de Ventanas there are patches of this habitat – the only habitat, as far as we know – where the Magnolia polyhypsophylla grows.
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In July 2019, I took a bus from Medellín to Yarumal, a four-hour drive north to try to see an almanegra for myself. According to The Red List of Magnoliacea produced by the Botanic Gardens Conservation International, in 2016 there were only twelve individual examples of the species left. Every one of them, I learned in the course of three trips, was found as the result of a string of coincidences early in the new millennium.
In 1999, a group of botanists, gathered at an international congress in Saint Louis, United States, proposed a global commitment to stopping the mass extinction of plant species (since 1750, at least 571 have disappeared, according to a study in the journal Nature.) The proposal created at that conference soon won support around the world. Even before the final plan was approved by the United Nations, in Colombia the Humboldt Institute developed the " National Strategy for Plant Conservation ”, a roadmap that sought to promote plant conservation at a local level. The document sought to unify criteria to protect endangered plant families and species.
Around 2000, the different actors involved in drafting the document proposed a pilot of the conservation strategy with one family and one genus of plants. Álvaro Cogollo, from the science department at the Botanical Gardens of Medellín, proposed trying it with the magnolia family. He made the suggestion out of curiosity because at that time, Cogollo, an affable and portly botanist from Cordoba with a thick voice and good last name, had barely any idea about that particular plant family, which in a way was strange given his long career.
Cogollo loved plants from childhood. His grandmother was the village healer and midwife, and for as long as he could remember he had followed her around, jotting in a small notebook the names of the plants she used in her work. Partly because of her influence, Cogollo studied biology at the University of Antioquia. By 2000, he had already registered over a hundred new plant species. Yet he’d never had anything to do with magnolias. He knew Gustavo Lozano and his work, so he knew that the family was taxonomically easy to identify, had a wide distribution in the country and, and was significantly threatened. It met the requirements for the pilot plan, so he included it in the list of candidates chosen by each specialist.
By a stroke of luck, according to what Cogollo told me one afternoon in July at the Herbarium of the Botanical Gardens in Medellín, the magnolias won the vote. As a reward, Cogollo was tasked with carrying out the pilot plan. The first thing he did was send a survey to all the herbaria and botanical gardens in the country asking for information about magnolias from their archives. Initially, none of them responded. After a few months, some sent emails saying they had nothing much about those plants.
There was nothing strange about that. Today around 390,000 species of plants have been classified in the world. At least 298 of these belong to the genus Magnolia. The greatest variety is found in China, where more than 150 species have been identified. Colombia has the second most species under this classification, with almost 40, but, until about two decades ago, most botanists were unaware that the country had such a variety.
This is reflected in Colombian culture. In various countries around the world, magnolias spring up in art, literature and popular beliefs. In the United States, the magnolia is the official state flower of Louisiana, where it is illegal to uproot magnolias growing on government property. Walt Whitman, Silvia Plath and Emily Dickinson mention it in their poems. Robert Mapplethorpe outlined its petals in his photographs. In the south, where garlands of magnolias used to hang on people’s front doors, the expression "steel magnolia" is used to describe the strength of a woman. The flower is generally associated with that area of the country, although not always in a positive way. It was the emblem of the Confederate Army. One of the most popular trees on slave plantations. It features in "Strange Fruit", the famous song by Billie Holliday which mentions the "scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh" in the air during the lynching of an African American.
In Southeast Asia, these flowers are used as air fresheners in taxis, shops, and hotel lobbies. In Mexico, the shoots of the Magnolia macrophylla are used to decorate churches at Easter. During the winter in Japan, people would hang hundreds of poems from the bare branches of magnolias trees, and bake small cakes in the shape of flower petals. In China, according to The World of Magnolias by horticulturist Dorothy Callaway, Buddhist monks planted them in their monasteries as early as 650. Poets and writers celebrated them, and artists often used them in their paintings (in the West they can be found in works by Matisse, Frida Kahlo and Martin Johnson Heade). The bark, shoots and other parts are still used today in the traditional medicine of many countries. The magnolia is also the official flower of Shanghai and the origin of the name Mulán, the princess that Disney created from a Chinese legend.
In many places, magnolias are credited with supernatural powers. At Swarthmore College, in the United States, there is a grove of magnolia trees that allegedly opens a portal to interdimensional journeys. According to specialists in essences, aromatherapy and such like, Magnolias are effective floral protection for people whose bodies were used in black magic rituals in past lives. According to the treatise Plant Lore, Legends and Lyrics, compiled in the late nineteenth century by London publisher Richard Folkard, the Magnolia grandiflora perfume is so powerful that it can cause death. For this reason, Native Americans never slept under a flowering magnolia tree. The magnolia, claims Folkard, is a demon plant that belongs to the same class as oleanders, manchineel and the ‘plant of the thieves of the Mountains of Franche-Comté’, whose sap gives witches the power to fly on their brooms.
In Colombia, foreign magnolia species were known, but, as Álvaro Cogollo realised at the beginning of his research, few people had any idea that local species existed. For this, Cogollo limited the search for magnolias in the pilot plan to the Department of Antioquia. To begin with, he designed a ‘Wanted’ poster, which asked people to call the Botanical Garden if they came across one of the trees during a trip into the mountains.
When the call was met by total silence, Cogollo commissioned Marcela Serna, a tireless forestry engineer and a former student of his at Medellín National University, to carry out the first investigations in the area around Yarumal. On that occasion, Marcela travelled to the area on the trail of a Magnolia yarumalensis, another endangered species. While she was exploring the surroundings of the town, she came across a tree in the Talauma group in a clearing of stubble by the side of the road. Later, and with some difficulty, she managed to identify it as an almanegra de las Ventanas. At that time, that relative of our tree painted with the yellow number 2 was the only living Magnolia polyhypsophylla reported.
In 2002, with resources from Corantioquia, the autonomous corporation of the Department, Marcela Serna returned to Yarumal. The trip had the express purpose of finding and reporting the existence of more specimens of almanegra de las Ventanas. Today, Marcela is probably the person who knows most about this tree in the whole world. Dr Gary Knox, Professor of Horticulture at the University of Florida, Andrew Bunting, author of The Plant Lover’s Guide to Magnolias, and Richard Figlar, taxonomist and former president of the Magnolia Society, three world-renowned magnolias experts, recommended that I speak to her when I contacted them to ask about the history of this plant family. She has detailed several new species and can talk in depth about almost all Colombian magnolias. At that time, however, she was only just beginning to get acquainted with the almanegra de las Ventanas. "Listen, that tree gave me a lot of grief", she told me.
On that 2002 trip, near a valley that is home to a stream known as the Quebrada del Oro, Marcela contacted Eduardo Restrepo, El Mampiro, the same farm worker who 25 years before had accompanied Gustavo Lozano to explore the region. For three days and two nights they toured the valleys and hills around Yarumal. The budget granted by Corantioquia didn’t stretch to any more days, so, resignedly, Marcela called a trusted taxi driver to come and get her and take her back to town, where Álvaro Cogollo was waiting for her.
On the way, they picked up a group of farm workers, one of whom was Jairo Restrepo, a cousin of El Mampiro. While Marcela was telling the taxi driver about her fruitless search, Jairo interrupted her. He didn’t like to intrude, but he had overheard the conversation and maybe he could help her. He knew where there was one of those trees, he told her. If they turned around, he would take her straight there.
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Since their arrival in America, Europeans have been fascinated by the magnolia family. Many of the North American varieties lose their leaves in winter and bloom before forming new leaves. For a short time, then, they are trees composed entirely of flowers, like the yellow elder, the Australian illawarra flame tree, or Japanese cherry trees. Partly because of that, they were soon sought at all costs by nobles, botanists and gardeners.
In 1688, John Bannister, an English clergyman and naturalist, sent a specimen of Magnolia virginiana to London, one of the earliest plant exchanges from North America to England. Banister named the plant Laurus tulipifera, foliis subtus ex cinereo aut argenteo purpurascentibus, or ‘tulip tree with laurel leaves whose undersides turn from ash grey to purple’.
The name magnolia was coined by the Bernardine monk Charles Plumier to describe the genus of a tree known as talauma, collected in Martinique in 1703. Plumier, whose name is honoured today in the genus Plumeria, to which plants such as frangipani belong, wanted to pay homage to Pierre Magnol, the French botanist who formulated the concept of family in the plant kingdom on the basis of morphological comparison between species. In 1735, Carlos Linnaeus, the Swedish scientist responsible for the modern taxonomic system, made the name official by including Plumier's appellation in his work Systema Naturae.
In July 2019, about 17 years after Marcela Serna's visit to Yarumal, I met Carlos Mauricio Mazo, the person primarily responsible for the discovery of the other ten trees that appeared on the Botanic Gardens Conservation International Red List. He was waiting for me one morning in town to tell me how he knew the name of the tree. Mauricio, a 37-year-old nature fan from Yarumal, had been involved with magnolias through Corantioquia and the conservation initiative where Álvaro Cogollo and Marcela Serna worked.
In his teens, Mauricio liked to go up the mountain to hike, in search of exotic plants, birds and other animals. On one occasion, he found a white-tailed hawk’s nest in a tree and built a small hide so that he could track it. Early one morning, he took the opportunity to take photos of the chicks. The day they cut down the tree where the nest was, he took the photos to the local authorities to report the death of the hawks. He accomplished nothing, but one of the people he spoke to recommended contacting Álvaro Cogollo at Corantioquia.
In 2004, Mauricio learned to identify magnolias and started looking for the almanegra. He made field trips with botanists, orchidologists, ornithologists and all kinds of experts. He learned to recognise the song of the tanagers of Alto de Ventanas; to identify the favourite fruits of the different types of quetzals; to classify the different pollinators of cloud forest orchids; to spot the many ferns that grew in the mountains; and to distinguish in a matter of seconds the surviving magnolia species around Yarumal.
On one of those outings, Mauricio spoke with Marcela, who directed him to Eduardo Restrepo, El Mampiro. Through him, he met Jairo, Román and Emerio Restrepo, three brothers from the countryside, cousins of El Mampiro. Mauricio told them about the critical conservation status of the almanegra and, one by one, he convinced them to help him. He told them about its evolutionary history and about the project he was carrying out at the Botanical Garden of Medellín. With help from them and other people in the region, he continued to search for trees, even after Corantioquia's funding ran out. “The project finished and the tree was left orphaned,” he told me shortly after we met. In his own time, and through word of mouth, he made a list of the features and location of the magnolia trees in the area.
On my first visit, as he handed me a helmet and pointed to the back seat of his motorbike, he told me that he had not only identified the twelve specimens of almanegra mentioned in the Red List, but a total of 36 specimens. He marked each of them, including the tree in this story, with a number and a stripe around the trunk in yellow paint. He had been chasing the almanegra for almost fifteen years. He knew its history, its quirks and the general ignorance that existed around this species of tree.
Until a couple of days before meeting Mauricio, I, like the majority of the population, was unaware that the word magnolia referred to a genus of plants. I knew it was the name of a flower and the name of a Thomas Anderson film. I could also point to the five magnolia trees that grow on my block in Bogotá, but I lazily assumed that it was the only species that existed in the world (they are, I now know, specimens of the aforementioned Magnolia grandiflora, a species from the USA that adapts very well to cities). I had learned of the existence of the almanegra de las Ventanas when I asked about the tree in greatest danger of extinction in Colombia, but knew nothing about its origin and what made it special.
That morning in July 2019, in Yarumal, I got on Mauricio's motorcycle without a much better idea of what I was looking for. I clung to the saddle as we headed up the hill on the way out of town. After a while, we left the main road. After a journey of almost two hours along trails and cliffs that cut through the mountains of the Cordillera Central, we reached the entrance to the Los Magnolios reserve. Waiting for us was a group of botanists and ornithologists from the University of Antioquia who had come to collect samples and watch the birds ("Lifer," says a birder when he sees a species of bird for the first time in his life). A pair of mules carried the group's food, suitcases and equipment. None of them had a clue what an almanegra was.
On the way to a small house where we spent the night, we walked through patches of cloud forest where, a couple of months ago, the camera traps had captured oncillas, deer and a jaguar. The botanists cut branches, flowers and fruits, and ornithologists identified distant birds from their songs. Everybody spoke Latin and looked at me with a mixture of mockery, boredom, and compassion when I called plants and birds by their common names. At one point, Mauricio and I stopped in the middle of a pasture in front of a cluster of trees. Pointing to a patch of the landscape about fifteen meters away, I asked him what he could see there. In just over a minute he listed twenty-two species of plants, with their respective scientific names. I saw grass, trees and ferns.
We walked down the mountain, crossing scant patches of forest framed by areas of nothing but fog and parakeet green pastures. The clusters of trees were the exception. Archipelagos in the middle of an ocean of grass. In 2018, according to Ideam, 197,159 hectares of forests were cut down in Colombia; a surface area greater than that covered by Bogotá. According to the Humboldt Institute, magnolias are found in the largest centres of deforestation in the country. (In December 2019, for the first time, I requested information on the subject from the Ministry of the Environment; they promised me data and an interview that is still not forthcoming.) Our drive to the house where we spent the night showed just that.
For more than a decade, Álvaro Cogollo had been aware of this problem. In 2016, in response to the levels of deforestation in the area, Cogollo formed the Salvamontes Corporation, together with a group of twenty-two investors. At Mauricio’s insistence, the corporation bought some of the farms from the locals in order to turn them back into reservations. Later, with the support of international organisations such as South Polem they acquired more land. Today, Salvamontes has 330 hectares, divided into three reserves –Los Magnolios, La Selva and La Esperanza– where almost two dozen almanegras still survive.
The morning after we arrived at Los Magnolios, Mauricio, the botanists, ornithologists and myself visited one of the trees after a long walk through fog-shrouded stubble. Almanegra number 26 was about fifteen feet tall, nearly half the size of tree number 2, and was growing beside a fallen log in the process of decomposition. A tangle of plants adorned its branches. It seemed to have no features to distinguish it from the other trees growing around it. At that time of year, it had neither fruit nor flowers. A cloud of flies stalked us under their leaves. The botanists spent a minute on it and then got distracted by birdsong.
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In early November 2019, I returned to the north of Antioquia to visit another almanegra and try to understand the importance of this tree. Again, Mauricio picked me up on his motorbike in Yarumal. This time, instead of a group of biologists and ornithologists, we were accompanied by Juan Antonio, his eight-year-old son. We headed from Yarumal towards Valdivia and, after several dozen kilometres, we climbed the mountain by another trail. Around noon, we stopped for lunch at the house of Román Restrepo, a cousin of El Mampiro.
While Juan Antonio ate one ham and cheese sandwich after another, Román sat down to talk to me about the almanegra. He had recently become a believer in the cause thanks to Mauricio, he told me. Since then, he had stopped cutting down large trees on his land and allowed cattle to graze in the stubble.
Until a couple of years ago, it was common practice to cut down any kind of tree. The almanegra, because of its rarity and the properties of its wood, was preferred for building houses. In September 2015, a 44-year-old farmer named Argemiro Ruiz cut one down for that purpose. The wood was so hard that it broke the teeth of his chainsaw on the first try. He changed the chain and made a new attack on the trunk, from which he cut the beams and joists for what is now his home. Before long, he found out about the critical status of this species of tree. He is now attempting to reproduce it by taking shoots from another almanegra on his property.
So far he has been unsuccessful, which is common in attempts to reproduce this species. Rarely do we think of a tree’s journey from a seed to a mature individual. It's a thorny road at the best of times. And a nightmare for the almanegra in our story. The age of the species and its hyperspecific adaptation to Alto de Ventanas have caused it to feel changes in its environment more strongly. And for a being that is incapable of moving, there is no choice but to try to handle those changes. Therefore, the existence of our tree is almost miraculous. To grow, it needed not only ideal conditions, but also a massive dose of luck.
An almanegra produces fruit once or twice a year. There is no precise data on how many times or when they do, but, according to Mauricio Mazo, the fruit can normally be observed around December and June. They are approximately seven centimetres long, with a diameter of 2.7 centimetres. They are formed of carpels, modified leaves that enclose one or two seeds, shaped like tongues or elongated scales. The fruit is green before ripening, but then turns purple. It opens once it is ripe, exposing seeds covered by a scarlet shell. Their fiery colour and high fat content makes them attractive to squirrels, toucanets and others bird species in the area. "For every bird you see out the window, 199 [plants] have died," William Friedman, director of the botanical garden of Harvard University, told El País.
The seed of the tree painted with the yellow stripe and the number 2 was saved from the stomachs of birds. After that, it needed huge quantities of water to survive. This makes sense given the precarious environment where they grow. The cloud forest of Alto de Ventanas has an annual rainfall of 4,000 mm of water, more than six times that of a famously rainy city like London. This means that each month, about 330 litres of water fall per square meter, more or less a daily bucketful. That humidity allowed the red, seed-protecting shell to fall off and the almanegra to start producing roots. But that was still no guarantee of survival.
The odds for successful reproduction of trees are notoriously low. The seeds have to fall in the right place at the right time to create the slightest chance of continuing the cycle. According to Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees, a beech, for example, produces 30,000 seeds every five years. If it lives to be 400 years old, taking into account the time it takes to reach sexual maturity, a beech tree would produce 1.8 million seeds. On average, only one of these will develop into a tree.
Our almanegra emerged from one of those seeds that fell in the right place at the right time. Then, like any other plant, it began to spread its roots once it received the right amount of water. Roots are important since they are responsible for releasing the minerals from the molecules in the clay. They also take care of absorbing more water. They do so in part by establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with certain types of mushrooms. This relationship, called mycorrhiza (mycos, fungus, and rhizos, plant roots, in Greek), was first discovered thanks to the desire by William I, King of Prussia, to grow truffles. The biologist in charge failed in his task, but discovered that the fungi responsible for the truffles were connected to the roots of the trees. Fungi receive vitamins and carbon from plants and, in return, plants like almanegra receive water and minerals. In several species, fungi cover a greater absorption surface than roots, meaning that the fungi and not the roots are responsible for most of the nutrients that the plant receives. A study by Marcela Serna and other researchers showed that Magnolia jardinensis and Magnolia yarumalensis, two types of Colombian magnolias also in danger of extinction, establish relationships with fungi and largely depend on these to survive.
In turn, fungi usually establish relationships with the roots of several trees at the same time. About 90% of plants establish this kind of symbiotic relationship, which is not limited to the exchange of water and nutrients. Various experiments have shown that, through fungi, plants receive chemical messages about possible insect attacks, soil aridity and other potential causes of stress. This network, dubbed the Wood Wide Web for its scope and importance, spreads under the ground in places like Alto de las Ventanas, and also includes various species of bacteria. Without that network, the almanegra could not have started chasing sunlight two centuries ago. It could not have fed, produced more leaves and gathered the energy to grow, strengthen and shape the curved trunk that today defies blizzards. The almanegra, like most trees in the forest, is part of a huge network. There is a famous Zen riddle, a koan, which asks: ‘If a tree falls in the middle of a forest where nobody can hear it, does it make a sound?’ Thousands, if not millions of beings, hear the din of its absence.
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After lunch, Román approached Mauricio and spoke to him in a conspiratorial tone. He believed he had found another tree in the species near the Quebrada de Oro, he said as he watched Juan Antonio playing with a stick. He offered to guide us so Mauricio could georeference it in case it was indeed another almanegra de las Ventanas.
Mauricio agreed immediately. We spent that night on the floor of an empty house on the La Selva reserve. A few meters away, Mauricio had a small greenhouse where for years he had tried reproduce the almanegra de las Ventanas. Half a dozen plants about forty or fifty centimetres tall grew protected under shading mesh. Each one an unlikely victory.
To avoid self-pollination, Magnolia polyhypsophylla flowers open first for a couple of hours as female, then close, and open again as male. Between their petals, they have pollen-filled stamens that attract a beetle, their natural pollinator. At night, the flowers raise their temperature a couple of degrees centigrade. This way, they volatilise a series of chemicals that attract beetles. "That's party night for bugs," Mauricio told me, describing the moment. “Those aromas have amazing effects on insects ”. An orgy of insects that the magnolia has summoned for millions of years. Marcela Serna has the theory that these beetles also seek the heat released by the flowers. The beetle, part of the Aleochara family, would need rest and warmth and that is why it would stop at the flower. There, pollen would stick to its body and, if everything it goes well, when the beetle flies away, it would reach the state of a blooming almanegra.
If all of the above occurs, perhaps a viable fruit can be formed. Mauricio developed a small screen to enclose the seeds and stop them being eaten by animals. These are no longer viable after two or three days, so someone needs to be on hand to harvest them or everything is in vain. After the harvest, the seeds must be passed through a chemical solution to kill some of the bacteria that can prevent germination. Then it’s down to chance. The half dozen plants in the greenhouse corresponded to six lucky days in almost ten years.
The day after our arrival in La Selva, we got up early to meet Román. Wrapped in mist, we followed his sharp profile through pastures and bridle paths flanked by beds of moss. Juan Antonio tried to run on ahead and threw branches, leaves and seeds at me that he found on the floor without Mauricio seeing him. In general, we all had trouble keeping up with Román, despite the fact that he was spearheading our mission, clearing the way with a machete.
After almost two hours, we saw it. It towered nearly twenty meters above the ferns, shrubs, and boughs. It took Mauricio just a second to recognise it as an almanegra de las Ventanas, number 37 in the world. He started to laugh, congratulated Román, and tried to explain to Juan Antonio the magnitude of this discovery. Comparatively, it would have been easier to find a painting by Rembrandt, an uncontacted tribe, or a diamond of over 100 carats.
We gather around the trunk balancing on exposed roots, vines and soil steep like a slide. That almanegra must be between 100 and 150 years old, Mauricio said. He look at it for several minutes and then he set about logging the exact location of the tree on his GPS. Once in while he would stare up at the foliage. It has a healthy crown, he told me excitedly, maybe thinking of the tree we had seen the day before.
It's not easy for an almanegra to live that long. For any tree to live that long, especially in this era. It seems almost a provocation. And it can’t have been easy for number 37 or for the tree in our story to have lived so long. We don’t know trees. Their lives, their struggles, their virtues. We constantly ignore them. In our eyes, they are mere objects. Obstacles that exist only when they pose a problem. Because of their apparent immobility, we forget that they are alive. But that's exactly what they are, and for far longer than any person. They live stormy, eventful lives. Lives full of silent struggles including battles, wounds and scars.
To have survived nearly 200 years, the almanegra in this story needed to create a barrier against the outside world. Colombian magnolias, in general, have a dense wood, according to Angela Castañeda, who is in charge of the use of wood at the Santo Domingo School of Arts and Crafts, in Bogota. In terms of growth, this means that they take much longer to develop than a tree with less dense wood and that they need more water, sunlight and nutrients to do so. That additional energy expenditure is intended to protect the duramen or heart of the tree, the woody cells that act as a kind of skeleton or support for the sapwood, the living part of the trunk carrying water and nutrients to branches and foliage.
The barrier is necessary. The almanegra and all plants must be protected from countless dangers. If these external dangers did not exist, a tree like Ginkgo biloba could live forever, according to biologist Peter Brown of Rocky Mountain Tree Research, an organisation dedicated to the study of plant longevity. Like ginkgo, most plants do not die from aging. In fact, few reach old age. There are numerous bacteria and fungi that can infect its wood and eventually cause its death. Half of all species of insects eat plants, and insects make up between half and three-quarters of all species on the planet. In the forests of the northern United States, a tree must deal with at least a thousand species of insects. If in the tropics the amount is the same or greater (which is most likely), this would suggest that the almanegra had encountered more than a thousand species of insects during its life.
Not to mention the challenges posed by humans, who were drawn to the tree specifically for its wood, its own protection mechanism. For whatever reason, nobody cut down the protagonist of our story. Despite the thickness of its trunk, the suitability of its wood, its height, being alone in the middle of a pasture, being easy prey; despite everything, they left it alone. An abandoned tree in the middle of grassland.
***
In December 2019 I wanted to return to Yarumal to visit the almanegra that this story is about. I planned to bring a photography kit that included various types of cameras and a drone to document the tree. For safety reasons that was not possible. A group of miners who were illegally extracting stone from the area had threatened Mauricio, so he recommended that I not travel. "We’ll stay away from everything, no communication, it’s better not to give them any ammunition ”, he told me. Not long after, they murdered a social leader in Valdivia, a neighbouring town.
The tree, this tree, I saw for the first and only time the day before I discovered almanegra number 37. I visited it with Mauricio and Juan Antonio. If it is still standing, it is the height of a nine-story building and found in the middle of a pasture on a steep hillside. Like number 37, it has bromeliads, chagualos and other varieties of plants living on its branches, but in smaller numbers. The roots of one of the chagualos descend from a branch and wrap around the trunk like a snake. A layer of orange moss covers parts of its bark. Iridescent blue wasps keep a nest in an oval hole in the western side of the trunk. Insufficient foliage indicates its diseased state, together with a bacteria wound about twelve meters above the ground, as I mentioned at the beginning of this story.
Because of its size and its solitude, there is something anachronistic about it. And like most anachronistic beings, it inspires a certain kind of despair. It is located in Alto de Ventanas, surrounded by grass, as if it were an emblem of resistance. And yet its fragility is obvious. It looks solid, but at the same time conveys the feeling that it could fall at any moment. The despair stems from the latter. The brevity of our existence makes us underestimate the conditions required for longevity, at least in other living things. We admire buildings that have stood for two hundred years, but we don't give a second thought to trees that have survived much longer. And there's something amazing about the ability to withstand lightning, storms, and onslaughts from wind and the rest of nature, including humans, for more than two centuries.
Its rarity also confuses us. We are a hair’s breadth from the possible extinction of a species, but in nature extinction is the norm. According to scientists' calculations, 99% of all species that have existed have become extinct. This is normal, given the mechanism that regulates evolution. However, it is an uncomfortable fact that humans are largely responsible for most of the recent extinctions and all those that will inevitably occur in the next few years. At present, 150 species become extinct every day, according to the UN, and more than one million are at risk due to climate change.
According to the journal Nature, since humans started cutting down trees, 46% of the planet’s forest has disappeared. In 2019, a report by the New York Declaration on Forests found that, since 2014, deforestation has increased by 43%. In total, in the last five years about 1,300,000 square kilometres have been cleared, almost equivalent to the territory of Colombia and Ecuador combined. This has contributed significantly to the climate crisis. When a tree is felled, the carbon dioxide that it has absorbed is released back into the atmosphere, either because the wood is burned or because it rots. Currently, according to the World Resources Institute, if tropical deforestation was interpreted as pollution by a single State, it would be the third most polluting country in the world, behind only the United States and China. Our impact on the planet is similar to a meteorite, accompanied by hundreds of volcanic eruptions: we are responsible for the greatest mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs.
At the same time, however, we cannot forget we are also part of nature. The result of our actions, in that sense, is not unnatural or the product of something outside the evolutionary processes that have governed the planet for more than 4 billion years. If the almanegra and half of the planet's species disappear because of us, this is not part of an event beyond the natural order. We are one more animal, one that uses and has developed quite complex tools, but we are nothing more than that. Why, then, does it irritate or hurt us to contemplate the extinction of a species?
Trees may have useful properties for humans that are still unknown to us (over 30,000 plant species have some use for people, according to a report by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), but that's not the point. By limiting its value to its possible utility, we again place ourselves as something outside of and superior to nature. And there’s something else: "On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree”, Merwin wrote. There is something in that. In the ability to see another living being, to name it, to describe it, to contemplate the minutiae of its life without the need for any justification. To discover that its relatives grow on every other corner near where I live. To feel something when I see them, because the story of one tree is the story of millions of trees.
In November 2019, Mauricio, his son Juan Antonio and I contemplated almanegra 2, our almanegra, for nearly an hour from a nearby hill. Mauricio was trying to explain to his son why the tree was special. He explained that it was older than the three of us put together. That it had been around for two centuries, standing in that place, growing, reacting to the transformations of the landscape. Living. The child took a moment to size up what his father had said. Then he asked if one day it would die. "We’re all going to die, ”Mauricio replied. The boy fell silent for a moment, turned his gaze towards the tree and finally he spoke again: "And when it dies, are we going to bury it?"
