At the start of autumn, in a chestnut wood, the first burrs begin to fall. They are still green and closed, covered in fine spines that catch the light. They lie scattered along the path among leaves that have only just begun to turn. Behind them the trunks rise straight, and the afternoon light filters through the canopy, soft, green and golden.
Anyone walking there on a Sunday in September might feel they had stumbled on a spontaneous gift from the mountain: a generous wood that, all by itself, drops its fruit at the feet of whoever stops to gather it. In a few weeks the burrs will split open, and inside will be the chestnuts.
It is an understandable impression. And it is almost entirely wrong.
The bread tree
A chestnut grove is not a wild wood. It is a cultivated place, built patiently over centuries.
Those trees were grafted one by one, by hands that knew which variety would give the best fruit on that slope. They were spaced so that each would have enough light. The grass beneath the canopy was mown, the dead branches cut, the undergrowth kept back year after year. In Ticino, as across much of the southern Alps, the chestnut was known as the bread tree: for centuries it fed the families who lived on the hillsides, and during the Second World War, under rationing, chestnuts became a staple food once again.
Nothing was wasted. The fruit was eaten fresh, dried or ground into flour. The wood went into beams and vineyard posts. The leaves became bedding for livestock. Owning a good number of trees was a sign of prosperity, and chestnut trees were sometimes part of a bride’s dowry. Villages built grà, small stone drying houses where chestnuts were dried above a slow fire that was kept burning for three or four weeks.
And there is one detail that changes everything. A chestnut tree takes decades to reach full production, and can then keep producing for generations. Monumental specimens can live for up to seven hundred years. Whoever grafted a tree knew they would rarely see its best harvest. They were working for someone they might never meet.
A different return
This is not how we are used to measuring the value of what we do.
Our horizon has shortened. We measure results by the quarter, sometimes by the week. We call efficient whatever pays back the investment quickly, and we look with some suspicion on anything that asks us to wait. There is nothing wrong with wanting to see the fruit of your work. But when that becomes the only measure, we end up building only what we can harvest ourselves, and neglecting everything that would need more time than our attention span to give its best.
There is an old proverb, attributed sometimes to the ancient Greeks and sometimes to no one in particular: a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in. Nobody knows for certain who said it first. But anyone who has walked through a chestnut grove knows it is true.
It is no accident that the word sustainability was born in a forest. In 1713 Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who ran the mines of Saxony and watched the forests disappear to feed their furnaces, wrote a treatise on forestry calling for a “sustainable” use of timber: never cut more than the forest can grow back. In Switzerland the same principle entered the federal forest law of 1876, after disastrous floods caused in part by stripping the mountains of their trees. Since then, the area of Swiss forest has not been allowed to shrink.
A grove is quiet proof that there is another way to think about returns. Not the return you collect, but the one you pass on.
The rules of those who stay
There is something else the groves teach, less visible than the trees. Many of them did not belong to a single family, but to the community. In Ticino the woods, the alpine pastures and the meadows were often owned by the patriziati, the ancient corporations of a village’s founding families, which governed their use with precise rules: who could gather, when, and in which part of the wood.
For a long time economists assumed that shared resources were doomed to be exploited to exhaustion, because everyone would take as much as possible before the others did. They called it the tragedy of the commons. In 1990 the American political scientist Elinor Ostrom published Governing the Commons, a book that showed the opposite with real cases. One of the most cited was Swiss: Törbel, a small village in the Valais, where in 1483 the inhabitants had signed an agreement to regulate the use of their alpine pastures and woods together, and where that system had worked for centuries. In 2009 Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics.
What she found was simple and profound. The communities that last are not the ones that consume least, but the ones that give themselves rules to look after what they share, and keep to them even when nobody is watching. It is the same principle as a well-kept grove: everyone gathers, but everyone also has a duty to mow, prune and clear.
Invisible care
Over the twentieth century, many of these groves were abandoned. The villages emptied, work moved down to the valleys, and the chestnut was no longer needed. In 1964 industry stopped using chestnut tannin to tan leather, replacing it with synthetic products, and that last economic reason disappeared too.
What happened next is instructive. The wood did not die. It simply closed in. The undergrowth rose, other species took over the spaces, and the old trees went on living, but more and more in shadow, less and less fruitful. There was no single moment when the grove was lost. There was only a long run of years in which nobody looked after it any more.
That is the nature of care: it stays invisible as long as it is there. You only notice it when it stops. This is true of a wood, and it is true of an organisation, a skill, a relationship. Whatever seems to run by itself almost always runs because someone is tending it without drawing attention to the fact.
The recovery
In the 1990s, in Ticino, people began to travel the road in reverse. The first grove to be freed from the forest that had swallowed it was at Arosio, in the upper Malcantone: five hectares. Today, in the Malcantone alone, more than a hundred hectares of groves have been recovered, crossed by a chestnut trail, and in some villages the grà are lit again each autumn.
Those who have spent their lives tending these woods still remember the old rules. Under well-kept chestnut trees, where the grass had been mown and the leaves gathered, the chestnuts belonged to whoever looked after them until Saint Martin’s Day, 11 November. It was a simple way of acknowledging that the fruit belonged not only to the tree, but also to the work of those who had made it possible.
It is slow work. The old trees have to be freed from the vegetation choking them, pruned with judgement, regrafted where needed, and the grass mown again every year. The first years give little. The result shows, if it shows, much later.
The people who do this work do not do it to own something. A recovered grove does not really belong to those who saved it, any more than it belonged to those who planted it. It changes hands. Each person holds it for a while, returns it a little better or a little worse than they found it, and passes it on to whoever comes next.
Excellence as stewardship
At this journal, Calm Performance is our name for a way of working that judges performance partly by what it manages to preserve. A chestnut grove may be its clearest image: a place where today’s harvest depends on decisions taken decades ago, and where today’s work will bear fruit when those doing it are gone.
Think of someone in a company who spends hours teaching the craft to a younger colleague. In the year’s accounts that time shows up as a cost: unbilled hours, projects slowed down. But ten years later, when that colleague leads a team with the same care they once received, nobody will remember where it began. That is exactly the work of someone grafting a chestnut tree.
A few simple questions follow, to take into your work. What am I building that will bear fruit after me? A team that can work without me, a skill passed on to someone younger, a client served so well they stay for years. What am I tending that nobody sees, and what am I neglecting because nobody sees it? And which rules, written or unwritten, protect what we share with others?
These are not questions that deliver results within the quarter. But they are the ones that decide what will remain.
What it will still give
Back to the path among the chestnut trees. The green burrs are still there, scattered among the leaves. In a few weeks they will turn brown and split open, and someone will come by to gather the chestnuts. They may not know who grafted those trees, or when. They will never know their names.
The question we usually ask is: what will this give me? It is a fair question. But there is a different one, rarer, that built the landscapes we now walk through without a thought: what will it still give when I am no longer here?
Perhaps that is the quietest lesson a chestnut wood has to offer. That excellence, in its most lasting forms, looks less like a conquest and more like stewardship. In autumn the burrs fall on the path. Someone, a long time ago, made sure they could.
