The Cypress Stands with Its Garden Rooted in Mud

Almost inevitably, whenever the cypress is invoked, it comes bearing familiar attributes: steadfastness, verticality, dignity, and resilience. Deeply embedded within the Iranian cultural imagination, the cypress embodies all the qualities of a mythical, anthropomorphic plant. Its soaring form has long served as the measure of ideal beauty—Ferdowsi likens the graceful human body to its stature, while Saadi sends the fragrant beloved, cypress-like, playfully into the open plain. The enchanting elegance of the Persian cypress has long shaped the image of paradise itself. It manifests in the gardens of Eram, Mahan, and the legendary Garden of Shaddad, while Persian carpets preserve its presence as pictorial reflections of the garden’s ordered cosmos. Rows of towering cypresses stretching toward the horizon signify not only the grandeur of the Persian garden but also its visual harmony. Within the garden, the cypress functions as a living column supporting the sky. Yet unlike architecture, this column breathes; its withering foretells the ruin of the garden itself.

Poets, mystics, and scholars have endlessly celebrated the cypress. Its mythological significance, symbolic depth, and allegorical richness have inspired countless interpretations. Volumes have been devoted to its freedom, its refusal to bow, its ascent beyond the clouds, and even its indifference to the temptations of the meadow.

Yet beneath this familiar symbolism lies another, often overlooked image of the cypress—one that reveals a quieter and more intimate truth. Standing alone against the forces of nature, often without the companionship of other trees, it sustains its living body of trunk, bark, and needle-like leaves through silent endurance.

Solitary and singular, while everything around it remains in constant motion, the cypress drinks water sparingly, sometimes over the course of millennia, quietly gathering within itself the memory of ages. At times it weeps resin from its trunk; at others, it laughs with the wind, its branches swaying in ecstatic movement. Its body bears inscriptions as delicate as leaves—marks that, to those versed in ancient signs and celestial reckonings, speak of forgotten talismans and centuries-old mysteries. And yet no two cypresses share the same condition; every tree carries its own history.

Its prevailing state, however, resembles that of a contemplative recluse—withdrawn into solitude, observing the passage of the world, the drifting of clouds, and the unfolding of time with a faint, knowing smile.

Perhaps that smile originates beneath the surface, within the nature of its roots. Unlike many trees, the cypress does not aggressively extend its roots toward the waters claimed by others, nor does it anchor itself with the tenacious resistance of willow, plane, or fig. Its solitude resides within its root system as much as within its crown. Rather than forming an expansive subterranean network, its roots create a compact yet stable foundation, enabling this living column to remain upright—alone in deserts, across open plains, or at the forgotten corners of cities. Its hidden root is itself another cypress: an unseen twin whose silent companionship makes the life of the visible tree possible. Even beneath the earth, the cypress remains self-contained, drawing sustenance without dependence upon the roots of its neighbors.

This condition closely mirrors the life of the artist, who, in seclusion and far from the distractions of society, worked in Bastam, carving into paper with a blade to create these cypresses through a language entirely his own. Whether consciously or intuitively, the artist has translated the texture of the root into the foliage itself, transforming the cypress’s solitude into the central visual proposition of this body of work.

Within these works, solitude becomes a distinct spatial and existential condition. The tree’s stature, face, trunk, and inner core become narrators of their own hidden roots. Self-contained and sustained from within, they exist free from the necessity of the other. The viewer is invited to uncover those concealed roots within the body of the tree—to discover, through form, color, texture, and material presence, the buried sorrow and quiet joy that lie beneath the upright figure of the cypress.

Saleh Tasbihi
July 2026 (Tir 1405)