No one was around to hear the sound it made, when a monumental tree broke the silence of the Botanical Garden in Lisbon, falling in the middle of a damp, winter night. It was early one morning in January 2010, after several weeks of heavy rain and gusts of cold wind that were sweeping the city from the Atlantic coast, that the old tree was found lying on the ground with its soaked and shattered roots sticking out of the soil. Rarely witnessed and often overlooked by visitors, such dramatic natural events happen very often in the apparent stillness of parks and gardens. People seem to forget that trees die too, or even fall while still alive, and have to be taken care of whenever this happens in an urban environment. In this case, the size and symbolic of a single tree required a rethinking of the removal process that had to be carried out after its collapse. I will describe here how the reformulation of this process transformed the entire operation into a design procedure, which finally turned into a permanent built piece inside the Botanical Garden.
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