'Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino': The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest

Denis of Portugal’s “Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino” [Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green pine] is the medieval monarch’s most famous cantiga de amigo and one of the best-known songs of the Galician-Portuguese tradition. Many have read Denis’s “pine song” as an allusion to the Pinhal de Leiria, the pine forest that he planted—or so the story went. Though Portuguese historians and paleobotanists have debunked the Leiria forest’s origin story, a preponderance of documentary evidence from Denis’s reign suggests that the monarch rec- ognized forests as poetically generative sites of political and social tension. In this article, I chart ecocritical and new materialist paths through the “pine songs” of Denis and other Galician-Portuguese troubadours by examining the medieval forest in its cultural, commer- cial, and poetic dimensions. I contend that Denis’s pines and his poems are affectively and acoustically co-constituted, concluding that the Galician-Portuguese troubadour tradition, particularly in its woman’s-voice compositions, encodes important ecological knowledge.