ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how national emotional attachments to the new independent state are shaped using natural phenomena as national symbols, such as the apricot and the pomegranate. It focuses on the relationship between nature and politics, and on the ways certain trees are vernacularized in Armenia to act as powerful tools in daily patriotic processes. An important aspect of this research is the emerging nationalism that is crafted by transnational actors, namely the members of Armenian diasporic communities. The author explores the impacts of the “greening” campaign launched and funded by the Armenian Tree Project (ATP) to demonstrate how symbols of native nature are re-inscribed in the rhetoric of diasporic organizations and thus produce new frameworks in which long-distance patriotism is constructed. Offering a brief overview of different diasporic visions of Armenian homeland and Hayastan, the chapter turns to specific examples of ATP's work and examples of how Armenian victims are symbolically turned into a living forest landscape, where the act of planting serves to maintain Hayutuin (Armenianness). Evidently, the discourses around the Armenian celebration of a green landscape are tied in with a diasporic yearning for the “homeland” and the ethnic fear associated with loss, conflict, and a hostile environment.
