Taming the Garden (Salomé Jashi, 2021) (Patreon)

Recently here in Texas we had a deep freeze, with record-low temperatures that surpassed anything on record since the 1980s. In addition to skidding cars and busted pipes, we lost some plant life. At my house, there was a large palm tree that sustained some damage but nevertheless survived the storm. The thing was huge when we moved in, and has only gotten pricklier and more expansive since that time. But gardeners know that frozen palm trees need to be cut down to the frond crown so they can rejuvenate and sprout again.

I told my lawn man to do just that, but instead he whacked it down at the base with a chainsaw. He killed this imposing, resilient tree, and although we never thought very much about that palm on a day-to-day basis, it was distressing nonetheless. It had been there for decades, and now it was out by the trash. Our property has dozens of trees, and while we don't always look up to appreciate them, we consider ourselves their stewards and caretakers. We "own" them, technically (or at least the bank does). But their presence attests to something that surpasses the vulgarity of private ownership.

Taming the Garden is a film about trees, ownership, and the human relationship with the natural world. It is an intensely procedural film, one that looks closely at large-scale human labor, sometimes so intently as to obscure exactly what it is we are seeing. Why is that excavator knocking boulders down? Why is this crew boring into a hillside and inserting rows of metal pipe? Why are these guys hammering 2x4s around the roots of a massive tree?

What we gradually learn is that this is a crew of collectors, working to remove hundred-plus-year-old trees from their original position and transplant them, stories high with their massive, spreading roots, onto one man's private residence. This man, who we could reasonably call Citizen Konifer, is Bidzina (or Boris) Ivanishvili, former president of Georgia and that nation's wealthiest man. Having made billions on telecom in the post-Soviet era, Ivanishvili now lords over a massive private compound, filled with animals, monumental glass architecture, and a personally curated, man-made forest. He sees an imposing tree, he buys it, and has it extracted from the earth like ore to be shipped to his sylvan Xanadu.

As Taming the Garden clearly shows, it's hard to move giant trees. Ivanishvili tends to collect from coastal areas, because it allows him to ferry the trees to his compound by sea. (He has constructed his own special marina with equipment for this purpose.) Sometimes removing a tree from its original home involves disrupting the surrounding neighborhoods and villages. When necessary, Ivanishvili has new roads constructed for wide-load transport. If structures, power lines, or other trees are in his way, he pays their owners and has them knocked down. 

Jashi does an excellent job articulating the impact of the man's tree obsession. Some Georgians appreciate the roads he builds, noting that they are capital improvements made without taxpayer dollars. As one man notes, "he's got the money, he can do what he wants." But we also see ordinary people, often senior citizens, crying as their own neighborhood trees are summarily felled. They observe that they were not overly attached to the trees in question, but seeing them hacked down and disposed of represents a violation. Crowds with smartphones record the slow, arduous movement of the big tree, while others stand on the sidelines in helpless horror.

At one point, a guy on Ivanishvili's crew says he's heard a rumor that the billionaire is surrounding himself with all these trees because he thinks they will help him live longer. Like Michael Jackson's hyperbaric chamber, Ivanishvili's personal forest will supposedly provide a super-oxygenated environment that will give him an advantage over death. Still, even if we assume that the rumor isn't true, there's no getting around it. By extracting and transplanting giant trees, many of them centuries old, Ivanishvili is using his fortune to buy time. Taming the Garden is both a gaze into an eccentric's thirst for domination through private ownership, and an objective metaphor for our collective ransacking of the planet. Alas, we are all living on borrowed time.