BIRCHES. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SACRED MOUNT IN ARTEDO

birches. It was the sacred tree of the Celts. Bravíos grow throughout Asturias but its densest population congregates in the strip of the Artedo coastline where Monte de Santana stands on a mamelón or hill that dominates the bay. This was a sacred enclave where the goddess Betuna was venerated - the first inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula were dendolatras, each tree for them retained a power, it was a different divinity, and Betula, who later originated Venus in the Indo-European, would be believed as a goddess of the love, patroness of fertility, caretaker of the harvests - but it has been desecrated and destroyed. They are building a highway with a bridge whose pillars rise more than a hundred meters. Deforestation has been intense and the environmental impact terrible. The birch wood was used to make the sandals or almadreñas and its ductile and warpable wood was used for the poles of the cart and for the yokes with which the oxen were yoked by the head. In Castile they used it in collars. Pliny in his Natural History says in a reference that must be taken into account: gallica haec arbor, mirabile candore atque ternitate, sed terribilis magistratuum virga (it is a tree of Gaul, admirable for its beauty, candid and white, notable for its tender wood but terrible rod in the hand of the magistrates) certainly, the lictores administrators of justice in Rome - it is that rhombus that all the civil guards wear on their chests - carried the fasces or rods and the ax as administrators of justice and in England had a birch variquina (the birch) with which the school director or headmaster applied corporal punishment to students who deserved it. It was a punishment administered in a formally solemn manner, no teacher could hit in class. Only the director after conviction and the prisoner had to drop his pants for further humiliation. In my time in England a great controversy raged at Westminster which lasted for years on the propriety or inadvisability of the disciplinary birch rod. The English are also Celtic and received the tradition of venerating the birch through Rome. Now when I look at Mount Santa Ana it makes me want to cry. They have destroyed the streets and the sacred corners where the nubero and the snake lived. There was a corner that I knew where I would pluck imbele abdeuinos shortly after they were born and transplant them into pots. His morphology, even as a baby, is wonderful. Bushy and leafy on the branch and with very extended but tender roots that grow wide and not downwards, which is why it is so difficult to transplant them even in the flowering stage. There are species that grow in North Africa but it also grows throughout Russia. It is the beli berioza or white birch with silver bark in the moonlight. A history of humanity could be written associated with this plant that has been a companion of man since the Neanderthal. But in Asturias we load it. You have to make highways of course but, gentlemen, without loading the outline. They have killed a man. They destroyed a landscape. Never better sai