The Bcharre Cedars of San Lazzaro degli ArmeniRecent planting, ancient provenance

These three cedars did not grow up on this island, they were carried to it. On 21 January 2008 a Venice Academy of Fine Arts student brought three young Cedars of Lebanon from her home village of Bcharre and from the Cedars of God, the sacred, UNESCO-listed forest in the mountains above it, and planted them on San Lazzaro degli Armeni as an artistic pilgrimage, an offering from one small mountain community to an island monastery built by another people who had also fled for survival. Mechitar of Sebaste, an Armenian monk driven out by Ottoman advances, was granted this derelict leper-hospital island in 1717 and spent decades turning it into a monastery, library and garden for the Mekhitarist Armenian Catholic order, still tended by the same order today. The cedar is Lebanon's own national tree, printed on its flag, and the choice to plant three here rather than one is deliberate in the retellings of the event, an echo of the island's own layered history of exile and rebuilding. Visitors who take the monastery's guided tour, the only way onto the island, pass the young cedars among a garden that also holds a Canary Island palm, wind-bent Aleppo pines, and centuries-old rose beds still picked for vartanush, rose petal jam.