If a tree falls and nobody Instagrams it, does it make a noise? Does it ever.
Though it was only privately filmed, the illicit felling of Britain’s landmark Sycamore Gap tree has caused raging debate for 18 months – including against the poor old tree.
Two men face possible prison sentences after being convicted of illegally chopping down the 150-year-old Northumberland tree in 2023 – for reasons still unclear, but with an aptitude documented on their phone recordings of the escapade.
Predictably, there was widespread dismay at the tree’s demise. It was planted between two hillocks next to Hadrian’s Wall during Queen Victoria’s reign by a landowner wishing to protect the wilderness area, once a frontier of the Roman Empire. The wall is now an officially protected world heritage site.
As with the felling of Auckland’s lone pine on Maungakiekie One Tree Hill, the loss of any beloved landmark – even a wonky, eccentric one – is mourned with entirely justifiable sentimentality.
But the rationalists always weigh in. Just as the pine can be a non-native menace in New Zealand, the sycamore, native to continental Europe but not Britain, is apt to become a weed everywhere its relentlessly fertile winged seeds settle.
It’s attractive and would certainly rout most conifers in a beauty contest. But those who constantly battle invasive seedlings are less enamoured, many finding the sorrow over the Gap tree’s demise somewhat overwrought.
Still, as politicians are always telling us, it’s a question of the right tree being in the right place. Like the doughty willow growing in Lake Wānaka, this lone sycamore had stoically posed for locals and tourists alike for decades, surely earning its residency.
What twaddle, protested a second wave of realists. Why were so many people lamenting the demise of this one tree, when councils constantly destroy entire groves of trees cherished by locals for sundry purely bureaucratic reasons? Weren’t tracts of flora destroyed for Britain’s high-speed rail line, HS2, now scaled back, possibly never to be completed, they fumed?
Come to that, why were the same hearts not bleeding for the Amazon rainforest, which continued to be despoiled at a planet-threatening pace?
And another thing, thundered a further platoon of whatabouters: why all this grief over a tree when we have human as well as foliar destruction in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, among a horrifyingly growing tally of countries in armed conflict?
Debate took a further tangent this month when the tree-fellers were convicted, risking jail time when they come up for sentencing in July. That, for chopping down a tree, when daily civic vandalism and vaulting theft crimes are barely investigated, and people get less for attacks on humans, they harrumphed.
Others saw a class conspiracy. One of the men had displeased some neighbours with his – to their taste – unsightly equine development on land he owned in their picturesque rural neighbourhood. He’d also had the cheek to sleep in a caravan on the site. Notwithstanding compelling cellphone evidence and its testing in court, this was just spiteful payback from nimbys, some insisted.
Still more speculated the men were from the traveller community – though there’s no evidence they were – and that they either deserved prison or, alternatively, were being cruelly persecuted.
Then there were those who raged (on little-to-no evidence) that the pair were low-income, poorly educated, isolated, struggling, misunderstood and shunned by an uncaring society. Social disadvantage is always a consideration in antisocial offending, but since both men had family lives, and were employed – rather a status-symbol in Britain these days – and one owned land and stood accused of being a developer, this, too, seemed a stretch.
What a relief it is after all this clamour that the tree has had the last word. Its stump is sprouting new growth.
