Yesterday, running down a rare stretch of green in sprawling Bogotá, under the steady watch of the majestic emerald cordillera, I listened to a man in Germany speak about a memorial landscape. 

On the podcast, he spoke of a greenbelt spanning nine federal states of his country, which was created as a social, ideological border to divide East from West Germany. Despite intentions of oppression, here, nature thrived. It is now one of the country’s largest nature reserves. He praised how the border was overcome and expressed in his language how the green belt is not only a symbol for nature conservation but also an ecologically living memorial, a memorial landscape.

The German Green Belt paved the way for the far larger pan-European Green Belt, a network of ecological corridors that once veiled the light. This was the Iron Curtain, that weight that cleaved us all the way from the Black Sea beyond Turkey to the midnight-blue Barents Sea at the tip of Finland, hiding Occidental from Oriental for almost four decades. These evergreens now carpet a connection between 24 European countries.

Is it possible that, through ecological restoration, human memory stored in the DNA of these dynamic habitats can somehow flourish too? Repressed trauma liberated in bloom? I wonder if forests isolated by decades of war here in Colombia are softly restoring themselves to havens. Rewilding, quietly, in the reverberations of grief. 

I continue along this ribbon of water, passing oaks dropping acorn ellipses, and I listen to the seasons change in that Larkin poem: “the trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said.” Ideas sown by an arborist and a poet germinate in my heart: leaves as punctuation marks to the seasons. That familiar nostalgia that breaks and pieces together my heart every year and, after moving hemispheres, leaves me confused in time like the magnolia flowering in late September…

I remember the mighty resistance of urban trees, London’s ancestors, and I feel a longing. I fumble for the word to describe that grandparently knobble of an old tree. Comforting appendages made for holding with a whole hand, a lap to sit yourself snuggly into.

Although I never visited, the Sycamore Gap Tree stood for 150 years beside Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, England. This venerable ancestor witnessed contemplative walks, family time, marriage proposals, historical film productions, weddings, funerals. It was "a place where truly one could be set free," wrote the suffragist poet Harriet Robinson.

In the early hours, masked by the howls of Storm Agnes, a chainsaw was brandished, the sycamore tree felled. It was a strange act of vandalism that shook the country. Two arrests were made for criminal damages. Numbers in the headlines. Hundreds of thousands of British pound coins weighed up against its aged rings. This was a night terror: lightning-speed loss after centuries of gentle growth. Some commemorated the tree with a memorial service, an exhibition. Others asked why we mourn a single tree but forget whole forests. A hundred seeds and forty saplings were propagated from it after the felling. All is not lost.

After I left England, the ash trees in my village caught a deadly fever. It was a fungus, really, but ash dieback is gutting patches of Noar Hill where my childhood adventures caught wind, springs, summers, and autumns spent looping the sloped woodland and descending into my favorite dip surrounded by green, a great leafy mystery. It took moving to the world’s richest country in orchids, five thousand two hundred and thirty-two miles from where I grew up, for me to appreciate the delicate beauty of Noar Hill’s own. Historic chalk-digging pits were abandoned there, bestowing us with different microclimates home to at least eleven species of these delicate dancers. Despite their constant state of change, these ecosystems conserve the most sensitive parts of our souls, stoically, indifferently. In them, we find peace within ourselves and locate the missing pieces that tell the stories of who we are. 

I take the shaded path closest to the water and dodge the tree roots beneath my toes. For Herman Hesse, a tree says, “My strength is trust. I know nothing of my parents, I know nothing of the thousand shoots that spring from me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, nothing more concerns me.”

Though it stands in the hemisphere opposite to that of its ancestors, a two-hundred-year-old pine has become emblematic of its adoptive community in the Engativá neighbourhood of Bogotá. As planes take off from the international airport that continues to extend into the neighbourhood’s shrinking wetlands, locals wave goodbye to the ancient pine that stands in the centre of their town square. “It’s still alive,” they say, desperate for words to explain their attachment to their sick, “dangerous” tree that the council wants gone. Trees are pillars of our communities, our common inheritance, our swings, our homes, our oxygen, our water, our roots.

I learn about the pine from a woman in our WhatsApp group. She implores us to save it from the mayor’s chainsaw. Others lament the fires that have scorched the eastern mountains in this drought, urge us to go and plant a new forest. It pains me to see the smoke and I feel unwell all week, but a wise neighbour asks what use is it to bring saplings from a nursery and plant them on top of all of the vegetation that’s still alive beneath the ashes? “Many plants don’t die in the fire,” he writes, “they will emerge again, weeks later, stronger than those from the plant nursery. Others might germinate years down the line from a seed conserved in the soil.”

But don’t all of us in the ecosystem grieve the parts of our living landscape that disappear, that transform? Fragments of memory in the wood chip, the fungi’s gills, the beetles’ shiny shells? Rebecca Solnit writes, “The places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way, you too, become them.”

I notice the saplings and small trees of native varieties that have been carefully planted along this stretch of the park, diligently growing away despite the eight-lane highway beside it. They are “amañándose.” Settling in, making their home here, like me.

Because the green belt I run along is sliced into by the northern autopista, I am only now piecing together its full stretch. It is the final corridor joining the savannah on the west of Bogotá to the eastern cordillera of the Andes that ponders Bogotá from the other side. Water falls from the folds in the east and travels across the city, passing by my feet, until it reaches the hidden Córdoba wetlands. It is then sliced by a main road and eaten into by a golf club. However, the Arsobispo River meets these waters just beyond and carries them across that final stretch to reach the Tibabuyes wetlands, a neighbour to the Jaboque wetlands the community of Engativá is losing to the airport. 

The Muisca names of these ecosystems remain: land of the laborers, land of abundance, land of the sun. This belt is a testament to the resilience of nature and of culture, a trace of the ancient spirits and the people who were here before men on horses came to claim it. In the waters here, perhaps you’ll hear the whisper that the ancestors are with us. Despite the golf club. Despite the motorways. Despite the fellings. 

Those in the city neighbourhood of Suba who have retained and repaired Muisca culture from its shattering underhoof continue their sacred rituals by the Tibabuyes lake. Seasons don’t change this close to the equator, and traditions endure.

Perhaps one day, the golf course will become a thick wood whispering to our great-grandchildren about the city that once stood yonder. Perhaps all will be forgotten, recorded only on those deepest layers of bark, revealing itself in the most intimate communication between living beings. 

‘Inosculation’ is when the trunks, branches, or roots of two trees grow together to become one, like that profound feeling when snippets of understanding from different realms bond and confirm something already within us all.

Josie Long’s ‘Short Cuts’ podcast is a curation of brief encounters, true stories, radio adventures, and found sound. She plucks meaning from different branches of discipline and plaits them together to form significant, healing episodes that calm the noise and tune into the essential. This is my experience of listening to the episode “The Soil”, October 2023, and retracing the intimate dance between human folly and the power, comfort, and indifference of our green neighbors.