A VISION OF BEAUTY By: Jorge Bocobo

A sad paradox in our country is that while our flora is rank and lush, we have practically no parks where trees grow luxuriantly, and our streets and roads are bleak when they should be lined with shade and flowering trees. For many years , I have conjured up in my mind a beautiful Philippines . with rows of fire trees, kakawatis, banabas, floridads, dapdaps, golden showers, and other flowering trees, and also mangoes, bamboos, sampaloks, santols, narras, acacias, and other shades on both sides of our streets and roads.

This dream of beauty for our country is intensified to the point of poignant longing whenever I travel in Europe, America and Australia where I behold such a riot of colors in public parks and home gardens, soothing, uninterrupted green foliage everywhere.

All this vision of beauty can come to a fascinating reality all over our country if we Filipinos will but take up this matter more seriously and assiduously. Let us not emphasize tree-planting but instead caring for trees. Our people, especially the school children, have planted countless trees on so many past arbor days, but the trees have died, for they were abandoned after the first few weeks.

A tree is not just an intimate and meaningless thing. To the man with a fine sensibility, a tree has a personality, as it were, which grows into his life as the years go by. For example. There is on my lot on Villaruel Street, Pasay City, a tall dita tree, as high as a six-storey building ; perhaps it is the tallest tree in this town. It is so high that during the last war the Japanese garrison nearby ordered me to have it cut by at least 5 meters because it might be used by guerillas. I have looked up at it practically everyday of the last thirty-two years. It is a forest tree and this fact alone gives me the sensation of being in a forest, which lends me a serenity of soul and a meditative mood. How refreshing this tree is to me, after the day’s toil and tension, as I look up to it etched against a star-strewn sky! When I see some birds (gray and colorless) nest on its highest branches, unafraid because they know they are safe from human cruelty, I feel that a man’s life should be like that of this tree, shielding the poor and helpless and helping them enjoy freedom.

There are other trees in my lot: sampalok, chico, macopa, caimito, - that give us fruits in abundance. But I wish especially to mention one tree: IT IS AN AURICARIA OF THE PINE FAMILY. Its branches are so symmetrical that people commonly call it the Christmas tree. Indeed every Christmas we cut the top, two meters high, which we use for our Christmas tree. On the very top of this tree, there is always a star-shaped formation of branches and leaves, and the mellow charm of the new day casts upon my soul and indescribable inward peace.

On my neighbor’s lot grows a santol tree near the boundary, so near that some of its branches hang over my lot and almost reach the window of my room. Nearly every morning I greet the dawn through the foliage of this santol tree. On a clear morning the dazzling brilliance or sunrise is subdued by the branches and leaves, and the mellow charm of the new day casts upon my soul and indescribable inward peace.

Some of the leaves of this tree remind me of autumn in America and Europe because they are deep red or golden. When they fall to the ground, they form a sort of Persian carpet.

Throughout my life I have remembered the trees in our homelot when I was a boy in Gerona, province of Tarlac. Most of them are dead and their withered trunks and branches have long been burned in the typical earthen kalang. But they have always been fresh and luxuriant in the garden of my recollections. They loomed before me the ageless sampalok; there was deep gloom among the branches even at noon.