The Green Guitar: An Argentine Widower's Memorial to His Late Wife

Graciela Yraizoz, a vibrant young rancher’s wife of the Argentine Pampas, loved to play the guitar. Flying home over the plains one day, she saw a farm that seemed to form the shape of a milking pail from the air, and asked her husband if they could plant a guitar-shaped field on their own farm. “Later, we’ll talk it about it later,” he told her. But tragically, there was no later—shortly thereafter, Graciela was dead of a sudden brain aneurysm at the age of 25, leaving her husband, rancher Pedro Martin Ureta, heartbroken and raising four children on his own. Ureta always regretted never indulging his wife’s whim about the guitar-shaped field, so a few years later, he took on the project in her memory. Professional landscapers thought he was crazy, so he and his field hands did all the work themselves. Instead of conventional surveying, he would line up his four children in rows and plant trees where each of them stood. In all, Ureta planted more than 7,000 trees—cypresses for the guitar’s neck, body, and sound hole, blue eucalyptus for the six strings. At first, Pampas pests ravaged the saplings, but the rancher eventually figured out a way to surround the trees with scrap metal, and the guitar-shaped garden began to flourish...more