SM Skygarden: blending 'green' p.r. with a yearning for breathing space

he best time to visit SM City Baguio's new rooftop Skygarden is middle-late afternoon when the sky is overcast. As a photographer, of course. my bias is obvious: it's the best time of day and the best condition under which to shoot--oftentimes referred to as the "golden hour."  It's when the difference between the highlights and the shadows is the least (called "exposure latitude" for you fotog students). For practical reasons, too, it is when the average mall rat would most likely be indoors sipping coffee or in the middle of  some crappy movie at the theater. There would be fewer people, and usually of the quieter sort. Come out here early, or about lunch break  and you'll be bathed in a cacophony of squeals and giggles from the millennial generation.  

   The moment SM City Baguio announced the looming opening of its latest "crown jewel" attraction, I knew there would be mixed feelings among Baguio folk about it. It so happens, too, that it is opening when the city is still not yet fully re-opened to tourism. So the first people to behold this much-anticipated Skygarden are mostly locals--and it is deathly hard to impress Baguio people when it comes to "nature" and "paradise" issues. 

SM went to great lengths creating a Baguio garden, and for that they
get an"A" for effort.  But if you turn around and look out, the scenic
panorama of the real green Baguio is simply unbeatable, something
impossible to simulate.

   I have lived in Baguio for 54 years now. I have seen and lived through its greenest years. I also don't come from a privileged class, my single-parent mother supported my sister and I working as a caretaker of beautiful homes owned by others.      There was an era in Baguio's halcyon days when, being a true Summer Capital of the Philippines, most of the prettiest homes here were owned by wealthy Manileños. They came up once or twice a year--bakasyunistas--and you could spot them from a mile away. Wearing flowery Hawaiian shirts (totally trendy in the 60s and 70s), Peggy Sue crescent sunglasses, short pants, wide-brimmed buri hats and toting Kodak instamatic cameras (no Android phones yet). They looked like a bunch of pilgrims stepping off a cruise ship in the Bahamas. It was a shock for them to find out there was nothing common at all between the Baguio and the Caribbean climates.    

   Absent from the city fifty weeks out of a year, these post-war nouveau riche nevertheless spent huge fortunes maintaining their summer vacation homes in Baguio City. Every one of them had flower gardens (in the west they're called "yards"), some painstakingly built around exotic themes like a Japanese garden complete with tiny a bridge over a small wishing well, and such. Baguio's community of caretaker families were the implementors of those concepts, many of them even going the full distance into the flower business. 

Say what you can in criticism, it's arguably still the most 
beautiful viewdeck anywhere in the country today. The SM
Skygarden is destined to evoke strong reactions, for and 
against that it's probably wise to consider that if you didn't
like it, it probably simply wasn't meant for you.

   My own mother was a green thumb. If she planted it, whatever it was, it grew and bore flowers. Still a sprightly eighty-seven year old grandmother now, she had been a caretaker all her young life. She knew every ornamental flower species that exists better than a botanist with a Ph.D. So when I brought her to the Skygarden, I knew her bar was set very high.  

   We were still in the foyer leading out to the rooftop terrace where the Skygarden is and my mother noticed an anomaly right away. It didn't take her ten seconds to point to two rows of hanging plants and say,"these plants don't really grow on a wall" Then I said the dumbest thing: "They can if they're made of plastic" like I thought she didn't know.  

    She said, "I know they're plastic, anak, because the leaves of the real thing was dark green on the top and spotted light green on the underside. I'm just saying those two kinds of plants never really grow on a wall."

The implementation is close enough, based on the 3D
diorama SM showed the public about a year ago, minus
the flying albatrosses. 

   I read my mother wrong. She wasn't criticizing the Skygarden, she liked it. That's why it bothered her to see it being so inauthentic and unconvincing.  Once out in the open,  we found ourselves standing on AstroTurf  artificial grass (or some wickedly-similar Chinese knockoff) made from narrow flat strings  of polyethylene meant to mimic Bermuda grass. I asked her if that was "garden-correct" she said it could always be. A lot of bakasyunistas expected to see the same kind of grass in Baguio that they saw in Manila. So Baguio caretakers, wanting to please their employers, struggled to culture the species on Baguio's bitter black soil. The Bermuda grass demanded acidic lime soil, close to sandy--it does come from Bermuda. So my mother said back in the day she would often go to a nearby construction site and ask for a bucket of the contractor's river sand. She mixed that with our rich black loam and with the 2-soil cocktail somehow managed to coax the intolerant Bermuda grass to grow a demure half-inch or so.  

As evening falls and the lighted fountains spring to life, it 
becomes a spectacular outdoor light show.  Heavy jackets and
hoodies compulsory in the nippy Baguio evening air. 

 This is why Bermuda grass grew only in small patches in Baguio. Even in Camp John Hay and Baguio Country Club, only the greens (where you putt your last strokes into the hole) were carpeted in Bermuda grass. They could not grow it in large-enough swaths to cover the entire golf course. 

   The AstroTurf is totally appropriate for the Skygarden though. It could take the beating of a million shoes stepping on it all day. Even my mother agreed that as hardy and tough as Baguio's local crab grass was, it would be no match to mall-grade foot traffic. "Just look at Melvin Jones," she said, referencing the city's football field in Burnham Park. Actually, it's a shame to even call it a football field because of the park managers' inability to keep it covered with grass. Mother nature often does it without help, but as soon as the field manages to grow a delicate blanket of new growth, the city government promptly commits the place to everything from a rock concert to a fleamarket. Endlessly trampled underfoot the poor grass keeps trying to grow back, fighting an ever-losing battle of thriving on neglect.  

You can bring the pampered pooch out for 
a walk in the Skygarden but the furry mutt
has to be diapered.

   Skygarden's artificial grass may not impress a grasshopper but it will stay lush and green forever, I remarked. My mother dissented,"in six months it will be bleached white by the sun, they'd have to re-dye it green every so often."

  The trees in Skygarden passed muster, as far as mother was concerned. She said they were "perennials" and "stubby-root" varieties which grow really leafy crowns but whose roots didn't need to shoot deep into the soil. They will do fine in their constricted giant plantboxes but would take about two years to grow a decent crown, "I'll be 89 already  by the time these trees give shade," she said. The picture of these trees giving shade didn't excite me as much as hearing my mother declare that she  intended to be around to see that.

Second only to the karaoke, the staple obsession of the 
typical Baguio denizen these days is taking selfies. The
Skygarden is the selfie-taker's dream, every nook and
corner a perfect floral backdrop. Too bad, the obligatory
face mask and face shield under the "new normal" makes
all selfies mostly incognito for the time being. 

    Browsing Facebook that night, I read tons of unkind comments about the Skygarden from environmentalists, the so-called "hug-a-tree-kill-a-baby" demographic group who have no trouble reconciling pro-choice with pro-trees. Make no mistake: I do get it. It is lamentable that something as beautiful as the Skygarden would actually be standing on the graves of a few hundred real pine trees that used to be Luneta Hill's mini-forest cover. More subtly, Luneta Hill used to be one of those hillsides that starting in late November would be festooned with bright yellow sunflowers. Those sunflower bushes--marapait in the local vernacular--are gone now, too.

How will this artificial grass fare in the punishing 30%
Baguio humidity? Can it survive the rainy months out
in the elements? I think it will do just fine. They use the
same material to line fresh produce baskets in the 
supermarket that are damp all year-round.

 In fairness--and not necessarily in defense of SM--I did take "before-and-after" pictures of the thickest of those tree stands on the Governor Pack Road side of this mountain. And I can see that SM's landscapers and project engineers took very careful steps to keep the biggest trees--they are, in fact, still there today. (see below)

 This whole "green architecture" movement that is getting a lot of traction among property developers is a bigger challenge than many realize. Everywhere developers boast of designing "green buildings" and I know some of them are sincere.  However, the average person does not really know what the  "green concept" in building designs is all about. Few care to appreciate that a building has a method of collecting rainwater and storing it in large underground cisterns, or that its business units use water evaporator-type of air-conditioners rather than the type that uses ozone-layer damaging refrigerants.   If a mall required food stalls to install grease traps in their kitchen sinks, few would even care. Double-layered glass panels improved indoor temperature control, permitting less use of electric fans and ventilators.  Motion-activated faucets on lavatories or hand dryers minimized wasteful use of water and electricity. Overhead LED-lights to indicate "taken" or "vacant" parking slots reduced your aimless trolling around the carpark while your idling engine burned gasoline uselessly. All of these are elements of green design and the common denominator among them is they are not openly visible.

Thoughtfully, SM incorporated a rooftop coffeshop at the
Skygarden. Nothing calls for a piping hot cup of freshly-
brewed coffee more than a sight as picturesque as Baguio.

    Unfortunately, your typical armchair environmentalist demands to see green innovation made visible, not just discreetly applied, no matter how effectively. The premium in evaluation is the color green. As asinine as it is to suggest that one color is less toxic than another, in the public relations calculus impression is often more convincing than the truth.  I think that's why shopping malls all over the world try to incorporate as many green components--as in literally green in color--in their building claddings, ornamentation, signages, and overall theme-implementation. 

In the glow of Baguio's afternoon "golden hour" the Skygarden
bursts into a kaleidoscope of artificial blooms. Scentless, of
course, but totally safe for all pollen-allergic people and those
with histamine-triggered asthma. 

  I think the Skygarden  would have done just as well if all it had were rows of lawn chairs and  a few green beach umbrellas. Like many modern buildings, SM City Baguio is actually green in many unseen aspects already. But as long as one is looking for aesthetics to butress science, I suppose plastic foliage couldn't possibly be any more offensive than a gallery of  framed pictures of flowers in an exhibit.

   My mother had the last thing to say and it was kind to SM.  She said, "I think its intelligent they use plastic wall flowers within picking reach, and the real potted plants where people can't reach them." I hadn't really noticed. Indeed, in the vertical contact areas is where you find banks of plastic ferns and golden bushes. The real palmeras and dragon tails  are out on the ledges. Whatever the floral arrangement, the place is a fresh breath of air even though in Baguio the air quality inside the mall is proudly the same as outside. That's because the city has been blessed by God with all-natural centralized air conditioning system.  Nobody can outclass God in the all-natural category.

If SM's green 'pr' is to be believed, the true greening
that is making a real difference isn't happening at the
Skygarden but wherever they said they intend to plant
a half-million trees. I wouldn't mind photographing
and writing about that--if i knew where it was. 

    The mall was thoughtful enough to integrate  a couple of coffeeshops in this refreshing rooftop, too. The biggest irony is that no matter how hard SM tries to simulate a "Baguio garden" it was all really unnecessary.  All one has to do is turn around and look out--the view of the real green Baguio panorama out there is simply spectacular. No one can beat that. Not even SM. And it is all that meets my mother's high bar of expectation.  The plastic flowers, the AstroTurf grass--they could never fool my mother. Or even a caterpillar. 

Work proceeded round-the-clock in 2018 during the construction of SM City Baguio's annex.
Although there were some tree cuttings, engineers worked gingerly around the biggest of
them to avoid having to cut older timber. I double-checked--yes, the biggest trees on the 
Governor Pack Road side are, indeed, still there.

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

  

      

UP Baguio's high music achievers

n August 1982, the University of the Philippines (UP) College Baguio was barely two weeks away from holding its annual Student Council elections. My good friend Leo John Romero ("Blinky") had decided to toss his hat into the ring. He ran for Student Council president against a very low-key but potent opponent Peter Payoyo. Peter enjoyed very strong support from the conservative student demographic--which I thought well outnumbered any other group at the time. 

   Blinky was supported by a militant multi-organizational (or "multi-org" in UP parlance) coalition called the Alliance of Concerned Student (ACS). This was an amalgam of mostly left- or left-of-center student organizations who, for the limited strategic goal of snagging the UPSC presidency, had entered into an awkward alliance with centrist student groups (and even a few right-of-center groups, mostly the so-called "Jesus-people").

It was this man's run for the UP Baguio 
Student Council presidency that gave
birth to a little-known folk-rock band named
Montañosa Band. Blinky Romero was the
band's main vocalist and frontman--which
won many hearts but few votes. 

   At the time, I was in my sophomore year struggling to understand why I ever took up B.S. Math. Simultaneously,  I was associate editor of the Gold Ore, back in the day the most powerful local newspaper in Baguio City to go by its influence over the general public opinion. Since Blinky was one of our reporters, I needed to inform the publisher Benjamin Salvosa (we called him "Daddy Ben") of Blinky's plan. I asked him if he thought I should tell Blinky to go on leave. I remember also asking him pointedly if we should even encourage Blinky on his crazy idea.

   I'll never forget Daddy Ben's words as he almost fell off his chair laughing so hard, "Kung gusto mong makaganti sa iyong kaaway, itulak mo sa pulitika! hahaha!" (To get even with somebody you hate push him into politics).

   I must hate Blinky because, against my better judgment, I did support his bid. It was a true mission impossible. Blinky was bourgeouisie as one can ever get.   The only son of renowned film director Eddie Romero and legendary 60s actress Mila del Sol, and brother of legendary Spin-a-Win noontime show host Jeanne Young, he lived in a posh art deco-inspired unit in Europa Condominium.  When all of us either walked or commuted to and from school, he drove a cream Toyota Corona liftback. Even when we prohibited him from using it during the campaign, he still stood out like a sore thumb being one of the first kids in school to own (and flaunt!) a Yamaha scooter.

Grace Nono was the most stellar element of 
the band. She went on to become a celebrity
icon of alternative music and has won so many
awards I stopped counting.

"Ang hirap sa iyo Blinks, mahirap ka ibenta sa masa," we kept telling him. We needed to find a way to make the average UPian  relate with him. His girlfriend at the time, Glenda Valdez ("Pinky") came up with the solution. We would hastily form a folk rock band, which we named "Montañosa Band" and put up a series of free concerts at the UP Auditorium to drum up support for Blinky.

   Blinky recruited Lingling Maranan, Grace Nono and Noemi Aragon as lead female vocalists,  adding Steve Granadosin and myself as male vocalists. The unique thing about the band was that every member played the guitar. The girls all played classical nylons, Steve was all over the neck on the steel guitar. Blinky had a Fender vintage folk guitar, and I played a Gibson 12-string. When we all played at the same time, we sounded like a busy train station located in the middle of a fish market.

What distinguished Grace Nono's music,
apart from her hauntingly beautiful and
rare female alto, was how she transforms
music into a multi-dimensional stimulus.
You don't listen to a Grace nono song:
you heard it, saw it and felt it. 

   Blinky was the lead vocalist and frontman, so that he gets maximum exposure--which was the whole idea behind forming the band. With just two weeks in the run-up to the elections, we were mostly a cover band channeling Asin, Florante, Pepe Smith and his Juan dela Cruz Band, with a smattering of Crosby Stills and Nash (CSN) songs. There was simply no time to experiment with original material.   

   Grace Nono was probably the most stellar element in the band. I could write an entire article just about her, and I intend to. She was a rare alto when every other college girl of the era would channel Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell's stratospheric singing. This made Grace our logical go-to vocalist when we had to cover Inang Laya, another UP-based group that already enjoyed celebrity following in the campus circuit. Grace's hauntingly deep female alto was spellbinding as it was spectacular for her original vocal embellishments. Grace Nono would go on to become a big celebrity icon in alternative music and has won acclaim for almost every material she put out. Everytime I listen to one of her songs and hear that familiar drooping vibrato that trailed off into the void, a style that is uniquely Grace Nono, I know where I heard it first. I heard it first in UP Baguio's "Montañosa Band." 

Noemi Aragon now has her own YouTube channel
as well as her own store folder in iTunes and Spotify.
She's the main engine of a three-man music collective
called Las Vegas OPM with concerts and a radio tour
booked solid a full year ahead.

 It has been many years since Grace and I last saw each other. She came up to Baguio to do this installation-music performance at the Burnham Park lakeside in late 1989--a cross between installation art and musical concert. I caught up with her as she was launching these tiny floating candles out into the lake, to provide the backdrop for her performance. It was a small reunion of sorts since we had briefly gigged together in college. After the usual sentimental hugs,   she introduced me to her first child whose name was--and I'll never forget it--Tao.

   "You know, Grace, it's so you to name your child Tao. I know you hate prejudice and popular names come with the baggage of other people's histories that trigger all kinds of prejudice, so you thought up a name that is not only original but genderless. It's so totally neutral, so totally peaceful and an absolutely beautiful name, Tao..."  I said.

   Grace broke out laughing with that girlish alto voice of hers I missed so much. She laughed so hard her eyes disappeared and could barely catch her breath as she said, "You know, Joel, it's so you to tell me all of that in one breath!"  She wanted to know how long it took me to come up with that. We were both Visayan and kindred spirits in that regard. So she knew me quite well and was sure i had not said what I just said spontaneously. I must have given it a lot of thought, which means I must have been thinking of her before our meeting. In truth, I was. I had followed her career through the years and I owned all of her CD's. I never stopped thinking of her as the one member of the band who had the most potential to make it big someday. She did not disappoint.

   I reconnected with Noemi Aragon just a week ago. She has become a big OPM artist with a huge niche audience in Las Vegas, Nevada where she lives. Back in college, she was the perfect pinch-hitter for Lolita Carbon, the lead vocalist of Asin. The minute she broke out the first lines, "Sa pagsapit ng dilim, ako'y naghihintay pa rin..." of "Awit ng Pagibig," the UP crowd broke out in loud cheers and went completely wild. She was easily the most applauded member of the band and also the coolest dresser among us. She chanelled Taylor Dane with her flowing scarf and horned-rim glasses (I wondered if they were prescription) while at the same time mimicked the aura of John Denver with her complicated finger-picking guitar-playing style.

Travelling incognito, Noemi Aragon (left) was
in Baguio City only last January 2020 just
before the COVID-19 pandemic plunged
the city into hermetically-sealed isolation.
No one recognized her in the local pubs
where she had gone hoping to find old
gig-mates. She only ran into Vicky Bautista,
also one of our UP Baguio classmates.

   Today, she's part of three-man  all-Filipino music art collective Las Vegas OPM that gigs regularly in Nevada's music town and runs concerts with a calendar that's booked full a whole year ahead. She has tandem-gigged with Florante, the biggest OPM artist to emerge from the Manila Sound Era of the Dekada 70 genre.

   "I can't tell you enough how proud I am to know you," I said to her on Facebook's Private Messenger (PM).

   "Ikaw din, bok, astig your blogs, you totally rock dude!" she answered, and I could almost hear her voice talking that way back in college. I promised to do an article about her and to link it to all music forums in the internet, So she directed me to her own YouTube Channel Noemi Aragon where she posts her music videos. The channel also has forward links to iTunes and Spotify where people can download her songs.

Noemi Aragon was the not only a guitar virtuoso
who could cover any R&B singer you could think
of, she was also the zanniest in the group. When I
asked for a photo for this article, I wasn't surprised
she preferred the goofiest she could find.

   Actually the idea to do this short article came up in the conversation after I reconnected with our former band manager Pinky--who is now Glenda Shultz. Going through her Facebook photos, which only a handful of friends can access, I lose track of the places around the world where she has been--including some really exotic places in Eastern Europe. She said she tried to locate me unsuccessfully in Facebook years ago, "I was convinced you've gone off-grid."  

Glenda Shultz ("Pinky") was the band manager
of Montañosa Band. How she managed to keep
the six super-egos who made up the band working
together was nothing short of a magical feat.

   We spent a long time exchanging PM messages  reminiscing college memories. She asked how I was doing with the flute, since she remembered I used to play it with Tante Foronda and Steve Granadosin. In fact, the flute was the 70s generation toy which had spilled over into the 80s when we were in UP Baguio. Every other guy played either the flute or the cheaper plastic recorder.

   Pinky was beside herself elated when I said I had transitioned to the saxophone. She immediately booked a "personal concert reservation" and I answered, "If it will bring you home here, I'll play the bloody thing all day for you." We went on for quite a spell  and when she asked if I still did gigs for a living, my answer moved her to tears. I said, "Pinkz, paying gigs aren't half as much fun as just us laying out on the grass in front of UP Oblation, with the whole barkada, with guitar, flute bongos and shet (favorite word of our generation), just killing time 'cause we were boycotting classes.."

   "True dat," she PM'ed back,"haaay, kaka miz UPCB. Ang liit ng school natin ano?"   I only decided to let off when I was convinced I was making her cry already. "We had the best of times in UP Baguio, didn't we, Joel?"

   I said,"Yes and that's part of the reason why I do this Baguio blog. I was hoping I would flush out all the missing barkada. So don't be a stranger and keep in touch now, ok?"

   It's a wonder how a small school like UP Baguio--our population back then was only 840--could be the germinating pod for so many artistic talents that went on to distinguish themselves in the world's stage. In the words of Steve Granadosin, "it must be something about the school, or the times, or the people of our generation, or whatever we were smoking back then, but creativity was part of our generation's DNA."

Florante, he of "Ako'y Pinoy" fame is the
de facto patron of Filipino talents in the US
Mainland, helping discover and promote
many young upstarts, including our very
own Noemi Aragon who opens for him 
in his Las Vegas, Nevada shows.

   Ironically, it is Lingling Maranan I haven't reconnected with after all these years, despite the fact that we live in the same city to this day. She is not off-grid, we're actually friends on Facebook. But she elects to stay awfully quiet. Back in college she was a very private person, a profound personality--a mystery. She was the kindest person you could ever meet but she exuded a delicate aura typical of the tortured artist persona of the 70s in the likes of Joan Baez, Judy Collins and James Taylor.  

   Musically, I can only describe her voice as enchanting beyond imagination. She was one of the first to ever sing the song Awit ng Petty Burgis written by Bong Ramilo, also one of our contemporaries and in my book one of the greatest Filipino composers this nation owes wider recognition to. Bong Ramilo compositions totally dominated the annual Himigsikan original music competition sponsored by the UP Philo Circle.  It was the most prestigious contest open only to UP Baguio original composers--the cash reward was nominal, but the honor of landing the trophy was priceless in UP Baguio. You did not only get bragging rights but your song usually also wove itself right into the fabric of the school's cultural tapestry and musical art tradition.  I only joined Himigsikan once, in 1983, with a song I jointly composed with Steve Granadosin.  We came in a far second to (who else) Bong Ramilo with his song "Ang Bata" sung by (who else) Lingling Maranan.

   The only detail missing to complete this account is what happened to Blinky's run for the Student Council presidency. He got clobbered by Peter Payoyo in one the most lopsided landslide victories that, I believe, still holds the record. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Blogs are made by fools like me

"Carcasses" of diseased pine trees felled by city government lumberjacks from all around Baguio City
await wood processing at an improvised lumberyard in Dominican Hill. Many of these were teetering
precariously or leaning over power lines they needed to be cut for public safety considerations.

think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

     A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

     Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

     A tree that looks at God all day,

                   And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

                   A tree that may in Summer wear

                   A nest of robins in her hair;

                   Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

                   Who intimately lives with rain.

            Poems are made by fools like me,

            But only God can make a tree.

very time I read this poem by Joyce Kilmer, which first appeared in the August 1913 issue of Verse Magazine, there is this unexplainable feeling of melancholy that I get, The best way to describe it is to associate it with the color magenta.  And just as I only copied Joyce Kilmer's poem here, I'm also only borrowing the description of the color magenta from a dialogue by Blanche Deve

This old pine tree was marked for axing
by the government because some of its
branches interfere with power lines. Local
artists pleaded to be allowed to carve it
into a giant totem pole, after pruning off
the offending branches.

reaux from the hit 1980s television series The Golden Girls (played by actress Rue McClanahan). 

    When you "feel magenta" it's a feeling you can never describe: you're not sad so you're not blue; you're not mad so you're not red; you're not afraid, so you're not yellow; you're not jealous or envious so you're not green; you're not dead or grieving so you're not black. But you feel an anxious combination of all of these colors. You are feeling "magenta."  

    Magenta can be disquieting but it doesn't move you, and it doesn't afflict you with any sense of guilt for not moving. You end up doing nothing, and doing nothing changes nothing.

    I have been writing about Baguio's pine trees for twenty years now, since the 1980s as a writer for The Gold Ore.  It might even be  longer than that, if I count the years from high school, the name of  the school paper I edited was the Pine Tree in Baguio City High School.  My message is  always the same: we have to save and protect this precious dwindling resource before it's all gone. 

   The usual reaction I get from official circles and ordinary folk is always magenta--all empathy but nothing more.  People feel the loss, but not the urgency. They sense that something is not right,  but they are not outraged enough to lift a finger and do anything about it. Most of all they think I'm writing about an old and tired subject that, in the words of Macbeth, is just "a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

   It's not difficult to see why. Although there are notable exceptions, the decimation of the pine trees is not usually done by  a massive assault on the treeline in a full-scale logging operation.  The poaching is usually sporadic and widely-scattered--one tree here, another one a few kilometers away--not enough to attract attention and invite opposition. But the math is cumulative. If only one tree a day were surreptitiously cut, 365 trees  a year becomes a combined denuded area equivalent to one half hectare.  

The Tower of Peace park beside the Baguio
Lions Clubhouse was supposed to be the new
outdoor "Pine Trees of the World Museum"
but after all the hoopla of the opening 
ceremonies, the place quickly deteriorated into
a vandals paradise, instead.

    I used to believe that vigilance is the answer. But it only takes a couple of minutes to guide a chainsaw blade across the average one-meter diameter of a fully-grown Benguet pine. And the challenge is not really catching the poacher in the act, it's the not knowing where he will strike and when. There is simply no practical way to guard all the pine trees across all of the 57.5-square kilometer area of Baguio City.

  Tighter regulation and even stiffer penalties are not the answer, either. One can make all the arguments but at the end of the day, cutting a tree with a government permit makes no difference to the tree. Whether you cut a pine tree with criminal intent or with legal sanction and tender loving care, the tree is just as dead. 

   However, as rampant as illegal tree cutting (is there really another kind?) has been, the stubborn and hardy Benguet pine tree is not in any endangered species list.  If it was, it might even be a bit of good because that would finally sound the death knell for these trees urgenty enough to trigger a proactive response. But why wait for the peril to become intractable when it's possible to preempt the response?

   There is no mystery about this. In any conservation program to protect an endangered species, the scientific response is to increase its population, not just  prevent that population from dwindling. The Philippine Eagle Conservation Program, although still a work in progress, has nevertheless succeeded in pulling the Philippine eagle from the brink of extinction through its captive breeding program. Today, instead of spending time trying to capture wild eagles for relocation into confined bird sanctuaries, they have been going out to the forest to release captive-bred eagles back into the wild.  Coupled with widespread public education, and an aggressive program to protect the eagles natural habitat, the program has seen the raptor redeem its lost position as the apex predator in the forest food chain. The moral lesson is this: to protect a species, the key is making sure the birth rate outpaces the mortality rate.

Forcing the Benguet pine tree to gr.ow alongside non-
native species has the effect of thinning its crown.
This park was more verdant and lush with pine trees
when it was all the species allowed to grow there 

    To preserve the proud heritage of Baguio City's iconic pine tree, there must be an effort to produce more new trees and not just a vigilant watch over old existing ones.  Here is where the pine tree conservation program--so far a nonexistent program yet--could do better. Without letting up on the effort to catch and penalize illegal treecutters, there must be a  seedling process to produce pine tree saplings en masse and a year-round  mechanism to disperse them throughout the city for planting.  As simple as that sounds, the sad reality is Baguio City doesn't even have a seedling program, or a seedling farm.  You cannot count the handful of private seedling plots at the City Orchidarium because those are oriented to fill a limited commercial market for ornamental greenery.

    In 1993, the government launched an ambitious project that renamed the old Tower of Peace Park along Governor Pack Road as the "Pine Trees of the World Park."  The idea was to honor the one species of subtropical flora--the Benguet pine tree--that has brought fame, honor an instant recognition to Baguio City. It would be a living outdoor museum showcasing the Benguet pine tree, and to give it company other species of pine tree would be imported from all over the world and be resodded beside the local variety: ponderosa pines from the upper latitudes of North America and Canada, Norwegian folk pines from northern Europe, etc. To herald the project, a marker was unveiled by the entrance beside the Lions Clubhouse. It is all that stands for the whole project ever since. 

The lushest growths of pine trees can be found around the hilly
suburbs of Baguio where the species is allowed to thrive by its
own kind. Unfortunately, it is also in these places where they 
are most vulnerable to the weekend chainsaw gangs.

   In the first place, such an ambitious project was unnecessary, There is already a place that fits the purpose called the Baguio Botanical and Zoological Garden along Leonard Wood Rd. But even that facility has no decent tree seedling program dedicated especially to propagating the Benguet pine tree. 

In the second place, introducing a foreign species of any flora or fauna into a locality not its natural habitat is always frowned upon by scientists. To this day, Ifugao upland farmers ares till livid about the introduction of the golden kohol into their rice terraces by overeager agricultural technologists in the mid-80s. Promising a second source of income to farmers, the golden kohol was envisioned to provide bountiful harvests of highly-marketable crustacea during the fallow period between rice croppings. Instead the voracious shells consumed hectare upon hectare of rice farms all year round, while proving intractably resistant to any effort to exterminate them.

   In places where the Benguet pine tree is allowed to grow alone without any neighboring species, it seems to thrive well. But forced to grow side by side with other plant genuses, an inexplicable  phenomenon called "crown spacing" seems to impair the outward spread of the tree's upper limbs and branches.

Time is running out on Baguio's iconic
pine tree. Unless efforts are redoubled
to increase their number, and not just
to arrest their decline, soon it will be 
just another souvenir from the past,
and begin to slowly disappear like the
marapait (local sunflower).

  This phenomenon could still be observed today happening in Camp John Hay.  

    After the defeat of the RP-US Military Bases Agreement in the Senate on September 16, 1991, Baguio City prepared for the American departure from Camp John Hay. What would happen to the best-preserved nature enclave in Baguio now that the Americans are leaving? The question is not born of colonial mentality but of practical observation. Back in the day, when you entered Camp John Hay you saw a glimpse of what Baguio must have looked like at the turn of the century: verdant and fresh with thick stands of towering Benguet pine trees hemming in and around eighteen links of a world-class golf course.  The golfing is new, but the trees are hundred year-old straightbolds that have become extremely rare elsewhere in the city.

   When martial law was declared in September 1972, US military bases including Camp John Hay took heavy security precautions, and entering Camp John Hay became a limited privilege. Becoming this "forbidden fruit" destination wrapped Camp John Hay in a veil of mystique for tourists and locals alike. As a young Baguio boy in gradeschool I would hear urban legends of how going inside Camp John Hay was like going outside of the Philippines. 

   What bolstered that feeling of "like being in America" when you entered Camp John Hay was the fact throughout the entire camp,  there was only one species of tree visible everywhere--the Benguet pine tree.  Somebody compared it to pine forests in Minnesota to Maine, or southward to Georgia.

   Then came the conversion of Camp John Hay into a private golf course and residential subdivision in the years following 1992. One of the development parameters introduced by the private developer that won the lease over it was the diversification of foliage. They said having nothing but pine trees growing in Camp John Hay made the place boring and visually monotonous. They endeavored to introduce more lowland color to the treeline, theorizing that it made the place more welcoming to the lowland crowd, seeing familiar species of trees,

   Maybe so, but it robbed Camp John Hay--and ultimately Baguio City as a whole--of character and identity. More ominously, it signaled the decline of the pine tree as the icon of Baguio's landscape. Replacing it were several deciduous varities of broad-leafed trees. Incredible fast growers, a sapling today could be a fullly-grown 20-foot tall tree with a full crown in less than five years. It would take a Benguet pine tree 35 to 40 years to achieve the same growth.

A Delicate Species to Culture

   The Benguet pine tree is a very challenging species to culture. The only time an individual plant can tolerate being lose to another is when they are both saplings up to about a foot high, and only while their tender root systems are enclosed in individual plastic pouches. Sown into the ground at close quarters, saplings do not fare well sharing common soil if their radiuses are less than two meters apart. In the natural environment, thicker stands of pine tree naturally thin out as the trees soar towards the sky. By natural selection, weaker trees in between sturdier ones gradually die out, allowing mature trees greater airspace to expand their crowns.

    The Benguet pine is not a symmetrical tree, in the sense that its branches do not grow outward from the main trunk in a balanced way.  It's a common sight to see pine trees asymmetrically favoring one side, with larger branches generally  sweeping towards the windward side.  Strangely, however, cluster of trees tend to exhibit the same growth pattern, sometimes creating the impression that a group of trees were dancing in some cosmically-coordinated choreography.

   This peculiar growth behavior has helped to protect the species, too. Unlike the conventional ponderosa pine or Douglas fir which exhibit greater radial balance, growing in a cone shape with increasing height, the Benguet pine tree is not an ideal "Christmas tree" and is rarely harvested for that purpose.  Also, because its main trunk seldom attains a "straightbold" consistency, the pine tree is not an ideal lumber stock. When quartersawn at a lumber sawmill, the tree yields only very short lengths of wideboard most useful only for furniture woodwork rather than as structural elements in carpentry. When you talk of a house being "constructed of pine wood" you really mean that pine wood was used mostly for cladding.

    This makes it a greater challenge to undertake a massive pine tree planting program. The sapling mortality rate is exceedingly high--by most estimates only two to three saplings achieve maturity out of a hundred. The best chances of success  is when reforesting wider swaths of land, such as an entire hillside. Saturating the  

soil's bearing capacity by planting seedlings 2 to 3 meters apart, the rewards is five to ten years into the future when the planted area would be a new growth forest of pine trees 5 to 8 inches in diameter and about 12 feet tall.  In the urban setting this can be a tough challenge. A lot of changes in land use  can happen in five years, let alone ten.  Many tree-cutting permits sought by housing developers are, in fact, aimed at cutting pine trees that have just entered their first phase of forest growth being planted less than ten years ago.  

 NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON