"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 recognized 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, commercial, 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.