For the tag challenge 119, with too few entries, I had to make a picture for 'city' and 'tree'. Well, that's easy. I have a special exemplar though.
In the middle of Rotterdam we have a big, 130 year old plane tree (platanus x hispanica). Many consider it as the oldest tree in our city but that is not the case.
Breyten Breytenbach, a South-African writer, poet and painter, renamed this tree 'Tomb of the Unknown Poet' in 1986. It's also known as the 'Breyten Breytenbach Tree' or 'Poetree', which is of course a beautiful composed name.
Breytenbach wrote his 'proposal for a project' during his imprisonment in South-Africa. It was meant to be a tombstone with the following inscription:
‘Here lies a body
Eaten by words;
From such earth
Springs poetry!’
It had to be a meeting place for poets, a place for meditation because 'Man is a hidden poet'; THE place in the world to let the mind wander. Then why the tree? When Breyten saw the platoons he instantly fell in love with it. Why Rotterdam? Breytenbach considered R'dam a capital of poetry. Open minded and with attention to the poets with their ailments.
Originally the tree stood on the Westersingel (west side). After a redesign the water was diverted and the tree now stands on some kind of headland on the Mauritsweg (east side).
Around 1999 the tree almost died. Due to the the rapid settling of the Rotterdam soil the roots had no place to grow. In a last attempt to save the tree the ground level was raised and the tree survived miraculously. Giving the tree some more space and re-raising the ground level from time to time is keeping this monument healthy ever since.
