Design submission for FTO MYO quest

I don’t consider myself very patriotic. But one thing that overwhelms me with love and warmth and a feeling of home is the Swedish forest. I really enjoy the sentiment of this candle that “skog” translate to “calm of the boreal forest”. Because I would agree that’s an amazing translation.

 

I looked at some statistics. 41% of Sweden’s forest is spruce (Picea abies), 39% is pine (Pinus sylvestris) and 12% is birch (Betula pendula and Betula pubescens). Those are the four species of trees making up Sweden’s boreal forest, that covers 70 % of our country, a total of 280 000 square kilometres (a little bit bigger than new zeeland). If I walked into the forest barely a kilometre away from my home I could walk to Russia without leaving the forest. It’s vast, and the acidic nature of the coniferous trees together with the cold winters make nature here move slowly. The animals are there, but fewer and far between which together with the scarcity of rustling leaves makes the noice of the forest in to a barely there hum. 

 

When I grew up my mum used to make squash on spruce shoots in the beginning of summer. We’d make an event out of it and go out in the forest and pick the ones of the right size and then for the next few days the buckets with squash to be stood in our pantry and I sneaked a peak every now and then. It just looked like one of those witch potions you made in the playground with green little bunches of spruce-needles and lemon slices swimming around in clear water. I was always amazed at the end result and I think it tasted so good mostly because of all that anticipation and waiting. 

 

I’ve always thought the pines look exotic. I know they’re not, that they basically grow where no other tree wants to grow and there is literally two big pine trees in my garden. But the massive trunks that has that orange bark looking almost like scales on a snake and the fluffy little crowns high up there makes them look like something belonging in a jungle. More than once I’ve wished to be a golden eagle nesting in a tall pine tree and look out over the vast ocean the forest must resemble from up there. 

 

The city I live in is called “the Birches’ City”. There was a great fire that burnt down most of the city and when they re-built it they put rows of birches in between every road and every row of houses as a preventative measure so that it wouldn’t happen again. It did, and now the entire city is lined with birches. In Swedish the word ”bark” means the bark of a tree and “näver” is the bark of a birch. That’s a boreal forest thing it turns out. You cannot do much with needles or cones and thus you had to work the shit out of the birches. It was used for building houses, making clothes out of, making ropes, to write on, to bury your loved ones in, cutlery and even sometimes as currency. And this happened independently in Europe, Asia and north America’s boreal forests. We owe the birch a whole lot.