Green garden of the Martyr Imam Khamenei’s home vs. dark garden of Western civilization

From the very beginning of his leadership, Martyr Ayatollah Khamenei would plant saplings in the courtyard of his workplace. He sought to encourage the people of Iran to plant and care for trees and to turn this act into a public culture. Every year, in the middle days of March, he would repeat this practice.

Each year, this courtyard grew greener and more fruitful. Alongside it, the people and government of Iran—taking inspiration from their Leader—organized tree-planting programs on this day every year. Some people protected and cared for the saplings they had planted on Tree Planting Day for many years.

Gradually, this practice became a tradition among Iranians. On that day, Martyr Khamenei devoted his remarks to raising awareness about the necessity of protecting the environment, the importance of combating deforestation, and the dangers of cutting trees and destroying plant life. He would remind people that planting trees and safeguarding the environment are strongly emphasized acts in Islam.

Over the years, that courtyard had turned into a serene garden. Various kinds of trees, from pine and cypress to olive, could be found there. Trees that the martyred Leader had planted with his own hands and personally cared for.

The last time was just a year earlier. On March 5, 2025, Ayatollah Khamenei planted three saplings in that courtyard, stood beside them, and spoke briefly to the people. This was the final stroke of green that he drew upon the face of that land.

About a year later, just days before the martyred Leader was to plant several saplings again according to his annual tradition, American-Zionist bombs struck his home, his workplace, and the courtyard beside it. On the surface, this attack might appear to be nothing more than an assassination operation. Yet in its deeper meaning and consequences, it reveals a vast civilizational divide.

Martyr Khamenei and the tree-filled courtyard of his home and workplace were symbols of a divine and ancient civilization. It takes many years for a man to reach maturity in faith, politics, culture, and leadership as he did, and such a man spends years cultivating a piece of land, leaving it as a trust for future generations.

But on the other side are the hundreds-of-kilogram bombs that fall to kill innocent children in Vietnam, Palestine, Iraq, and the schoolchildren of Minab, and ultimately to assassinate the Leader of a nation. These bombs are the symbols of a savage and fleeting civilization—one that sees all its hopes and desires confined to this world, and in pursuit of them does not hesitate to sacrifice other peoples, nor even its own future generations.

From the very beginning of the rise of the blood-soaked Western civilization, this could already be seen. They killed millions of Native Americans and within less than a century almost completely destroyed their culture and heritage in pursuit of timber, sugar, corn, and wheat. When their ships reached India, they drowned thousands of years of civilization in blood, altered the religion of its people, and stripped away its industry to dominate maritime trade. In a matter of seconds they turned hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of families, and years of history into ashes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to send a warning against the advance of their rivals in Japan.

This lack of civilization has destroyed their own lives as well. In their pursuit of maximum exploitation of the world, they have deprived even themselves, and their future generations, of water, soil, and forests.

Today, the burned courtyard of the home of the martyred Imam Khamenei has become a symbol: The symbol of a civilizational war. A war between a divine, wise, and patient vision of life, and a satanic, predatory, and greedy vision of it.

The fire of the latter may darken the face of the world for a time. But the roots that have slowly spread through the soil do not burn—and again and again, they emerge from the earth.

(The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Khamenei.ir.)