A Ginkgo Biloba has died and it is not a small thing since the species itself is considered a living fossil, since it has been here for 290 million years. This in particular had been planted in the garden of Fonseca for more than 130 years, in an almost unreal corner of the city of Santiago de Compostela, the fighter capital of Galicia. The tree, then, has died. But its shadow survives in a handful of eternal words. In the past, that space was occupied by a botanical garden dependent on the Faculty of Pharmacy in which students cultivated medicinal plants. The idea was to heal the body. Things have not changed so much, because now it is useful to comfort souls. A Ginkgo Biloba is dead but his partner (the male is intentional) is still there. The Ginkgo Biloba female that came to measure 27 meters high was attacked from the roots by a fungus that wilt. On the grass, in the area that once covered its yellow leaves, now there is poetry. The writer Suso de Toro imagined a spiral that gave beauty regardless of time. He took the proposal to the Compostela municipality several times until someone accepted it in 2018. Then, that small garden changed. Even by name: Now is the Xardín das Pedras that fail (garden of the stones that speak). The proposal is to draw a figure from stones on which unpublished verses and literary fragments of authors and authors from around the world are recorded. The first station, of course, is dedicated to Rosalía de Castro, the literary figure par excellence of Galicia. He says: Dench here he sees a camiño / that non sei to where he goes; / Pole as n’o sei / quixera or be able to walk (from here I see a path / that I do not go to; The Basque Bernardo Atxaga, the South Korean Moon Chung-Hee and others and others. The poet Olga Novo says “to the last vanga / é or love” (the last avant-garde / is love). The Palestine Adams Shibli noted: “Nothing moved except mirage.” Where the rot annihilated what was capable of resisting more than a century, poetry resists and healthy. It is good to remember it.
