VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Ever since he took over as director of
the Botanical Garden at the University of British Columbia nine years
ago, Bruce Macdonald has known there was something unusual about
the scrawny spruce tree with needles that are golden, like sunlight itself.
For the 56-year-old horticulturalist who trained at the University of London,
Picea sutchensis aurea is a scientific oddity, a rare golden sitka spruce with a
genetic mutation that mysteriously turns the needles a lively yellow when
exposed to sunlight.
Grown from a grafted branch taken from a towering golden spruce on one of the
coastal Queen Charlotte Islands before Macdonald arrived from England, it was
just one more specimen in the garden, and far from the most magnificent.
Then a few days ago Macdonald read in the local newspaper that under the cover
of night someone had gone to the island and felled the original tree with a chain
saw in a confused attempt to make a political statement.
The crime shocked many people in British Columbia, where old trees are
beloved and at times revered. But more than that, it brought together science and
spirituality in a way that Macdonald never anticipated and still cannot quite
explain.
The Queen Charlottes are mist-covered islands, about 60 miles off Canada's
Pacific coast. Covered in old-growth forest, they have been the traditional home
to the Haida Indians, a small tribe that numbers about 2,000 people here and
3,000 in Alaska.
According to Guujaaw, a 43-year-old Haida spokesman who talked by telephone
from the islands north of Vancouver, the 160-foot golden spruce on the banks of
the Yakoun River had a name, kiidk'yaas, and it was among the most sacred
parts of the Haidas' traditional life.
As the story goes, when the ancient people had mistreated each other, the creator
was angered and buried the entire village in snow.
"An old man and a boy hid under a cedar plank till they heard a bird call,"
Guujaaw said. The only two survivors of the village ran up the Yakoun River,
and the old man told the boy not to look back. He did anyway, and because he
disobeyed, he was turned into a tree. "It was said that the tree would then be
admired until the last generation," Guujaaw said.
After growing for more than 300 years, kiidk'yaas was felled one cold night in
January. A 48-year-old drifter who objected to "freaks" and "university-trained
professionals" took responsibility in a letter and has been arrested.
When the elders called the Haida together, they cried. "They felt really
responsible for what happened," Guujaaw said. "They were supposed to be
looking after the tree and they failed."
The elders were also burdened by a fear that perhaps the old prophecy would be
fulfilled and that this generation of Haida would be the last to admire the golden
spruce.
In Vancouver, Macdonald's staff was busy checking the collection notes of the
Botanical Garden to verify that their golden spruce specimen was indeed the
living embodiment of the one that had been cut down. They found that in 1977,
Macdonald's predecessor, Roy Taylor, had gone with a group of foresters to the
Queen Charlottes and clipped a few branches of the golden spruce in order to
graft them.
The spruce stood on land that has been leased to MacMillan Bloedel Limited,
Canada's largest forestry company.
The clippings were brought to a specialized nursery, where, using an old method
of propagation, they were joined to a branch of a living sitka spruce, albeit one
without the special mutation to make it golden. The branch was then bent so that
part could be placed in soil, where after about nine months it sent down roots.
Two new seedlings were carefully tended in a nursery for about five years and
then transplanted to a forested section of the Botanical Gardens. Two years ago
the trees, then about five feet tall, were placed near a quiet stretch of the
Botanical Garden path.
When he read about what the golden spruce meant to the Haida, Macdonald
called the island and offered to transplant one of the spruces he had. Still
thinking as a scientist, he was taken aback when the Haida said they they were
uneasy because they thought that the branches used for the graft had been taken
surreptitiously 20 years ago. And they weren't sure if the graft meant that the
seedling was truly the same tree.
"This opened up a whole range of questions I would never have considered until
this came up," Macdonald said. "I myself started to wonder whether this tree will
really mean the same because it's been removed from their sacred ground,
propagated by us in different soil at the University of British Columbia, and then
been moved back again."
Such misgivings are unusual for a man of science. It is one thing to wonder by
what process sunlight can break down chlorophyll, as is believed to happen with
the golden spruce. But it is something else to wonder about the spiritual
appropriateness of soil.
"If I said I wasn't uncomfortable dealing with these issues it wouldn't be
honest," Macdonald admitted as he stood near the sparkling branches of the
golden spruce, which he had fingered lovingly as he explained the process of
photosynthesis.
"But I just felt inwardly that it was of religious significance to them. Look, I'm a
Christian, I practice religion in my own way. Making the trees available is just a
way of handing something back to them."
Guujaaw said the Haida have sent out about 100 cuttings from the top of the
felled tree and have asked the scientific community to help find a way to resurrect
the golden spruce. In the meantime, Macdonald said, the Haida council has now
agreed that it will take the Botanical Garden's tree to help replace what the
community has lost.
The Haida will plant the tree somewhere along the banks of the cold Yakoun
River, as near as they can to the place kiidk'yaas so long stood, so that this will
not be the last generation to admire it.
And Macdonald, back at the university, prays that the scrawny tree with needles
of gold will grow straight and true.