The central image of the film Taming the Garden (2021, Georgia) is beautiful, horrible, unnerving, unforgettable. In it, a tree floats placidly towards the shore: a solitary tree, upright, like an apparition. It is a ghost very much alive: a life drifting off into the distance. 

Other trees travel in Salomé Jashi’s film. The backdrop is disturbing. In the last five years, an estimated 200 trees, some of them centuries old, have been uprooted and transplanted to a questionable project: the Shekvetili Dendrological Park on the Black Sea coast. This park is the property and idea of Bidzina Ivanishvili, former prime minister of Georgia, who after retiring from politics in 2015 announced that he would turn to philanthropic affairs. Not few in Georgia suspect that the billionaire still wields great power over current politics; it is estimated that he amasses nearly $6 billion, more than his country's state budget. The park is ostensibly accessible to the public: a gift for citizens to enjoy. But the wounds it has left on the landscape are felt in other regions of Georgia. 

In Taming the Garden, Jashi and her colleagues approach this problem from the inside, from the heart. We contemplate the forests from which the elder trees are uprooted, we see them moving along the roads and we meet the families who let them go from their land. They receive remuneration, of course, but the images of the documentary let us perceive the other feelings that are breathed in these communities. The earth moves. The trees walk. The landscapes are redrawn. Something else must be going on in the background.

Ivanishvili is not named in the documentary. Not only because the case had already caused scandal in Georgia (and soon internationally), but because we could think of other fantasies where nature is subjected to similar "good intentions". Landscape appreciation has never been entirely benign: in the history of gardens, parks and landscape human action is implicit and often destructive. We transform the "natural" to shape it to our delight and changing tastes. The configuration of the natural for its contemplation entails a certain violence, not only the one exercised by the gaze, which turns flora and fauna into mere objects of contemplation-consumption. Physically, too, the riverbeds, the masses of trees and the habitat of species are disrupted to create fantasy spaces that "evoke" wild nature to give us "natural" jewels offered to tourism. 

Tamara Mshvenieradze is a journalist and was the researcher for Taming the Garden, in close collaboration with Jashi. "The first image of the tree floating in the sea is striking. Salomé says that was her inspiration for making the film. First of all, it was a very beautiful scene, but at the same time, very disturbing; to see this tree so tall in the middle of the sea. She realized then that there was something going on," says the researcher. "I also had this feeling, but I felt very overwhelmed by the information I already had about what made it happen." 

The filmmakers encountered resistance from those selling their trees. Although they received payment for their oak and birch trees, they were afraid to speak out, perhaps because they felt that, deep down, something in the matter was wrong. It was not just the trophy trees that were sequestered from their cradles, but the other trees that had to be cut down to mobilize them (one opposition politician calculates that some 3,800 more were cut down). Few wanted to give them information, much less allow to be filmed. "They refused, but we went on our research trip anyway and began to identify the points where trees were being prepared for the process," explains Mshvenieradze. 

"We approached the engineers and workers who were dealing with those trees. We became friends with the head of one of the groups, we stayed for days or weeks, so they finally gave us access. They had a sense that they were involved in a very particular process, so they wanted to share it, they were proud of the technical challenges they were overcoming. As we moved from one site to another, they would call to explain that we were good girls and that we weren't going to hurt them; I guess they weren't taking us very seriously. But those who were in charge of the process also trusted us. We can say that we had more confidence from the people in charge of the process than from the local communities, who were fearful," says the researcher. 

Thus, the documentary travels from corner to corner, exploring what remains and what departs. In one scene, a family seems to go through a kind of mourning as their tree leaves. The silence is overwhelming. So are the trees' wailings. "When people shared their fears with us they said they didn't want to be in trouble. They didn't say what kind of trouble, but they were very reluctant to talk. They would say for example, my son is working at the municipality and I don't want him to have problems. Generally the atmosphere carried some sort of fear, of reserve. If you can avoid someone who asks you questions, who films you, who connects you to this issue, you do it," says the researcher. 

Watching these displacements, it is hard not to think of how trees are uprooted not only from a terrain saturated with memory for its inhabitants, but also from their own tree families, with whom they grow best. They are now prisoner trees, captured in a garden filled with security cameras and guards, where nothing can be touched without warning. The film takes its time to let us breathe with these environments; the light movements of the leaves, the humidity of the earth, the undulations of the sea... Everything evokes time: frozen time, time that is pulled up by the roots, the accumulated years, tightly held in the rings of the trunks. 

The owners of the trees watch them go with some resignation and, yes, money in their pockets. Naturally, the trees were not uprooted from affluent areas. "One of the surprises I had was that these people grew up with this nature and I always thought they were very connected to this nature," says Mshvenieradze. "I was very frustrated, but I soon understood that there was an underlying economic issue. They would tell us that they needed the money for their children's education or for a medical intervention… They all had reasons for deciding to sell these trees. It was shocking for me to see how alienated they were from the nature that was leaving them. I can't judge them, I can't say it was easy for them, like this family we see in the film where they have a funereal feeling when they say goodbye to their tree. But it was shocking to see how distant they felt from those trees that had been there for generations," reflects the researcher.

Local residents and local governments were undoubtedly benefited. Expanded streets, roads where there were none before, money to get by for the rest of the year, some temporary jobs... And now, of course, the idea that the billionaire's park will serve as a tourist magnet, a symbol of Georgia's wealth (which wealth, is hard to tell). But I return to the movement of the leaves, to the earth tangled in the roots, to the birds that will fly in circles looking for those branches. The sky looks gray over the sea. The huge tree stands upright, held by ropes, floating towards another life or another death. In the new garden, they accompany each other in their solitude, which we do not know how long it will last. 

Taming the Garden is available online in Mubi

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With each issue of the column, Fernando takes us into the world of creative documentary through a piece relating to the volume's theme, opening us to the infinite possibilities of this genre that blurs the boundaries between reality, experience and imagination.