Yet another thoughtful piece in the Sunday papers about the Sycamore Gap atrocity.
The incident impacted me less than others because my whole lifetime has been more or less in lockstep with the story of global environmental degradation.
I remember being glued, in the 1980s, to a Sunday newspaper account of Amazon rainforest destruction in Rondônia – and the anomaly that, in the background, my parents were arguing about whose fault it was we had run out of horseradish sauce.
And who was going to get in the car for a four-mile round trip to buy said condiment for the Sunday joint?
‘Ecological wounds’, to borrow Aldo Leopold’s memorable phrase, have been stalking me ever since boyhood, when a godparent gave me Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I don’t know if I can even face watching Oldie pin-up Sir David Attenborough’s latest cry for help, Ocean.
I know my late mother had to stop watching him – ‘Too upsetting, darling.’ So the Sycamore Gap was only one in a long litany of horrors that have besmirched this country since the Industrial Revolution. The reason the image resonated with so many novice ecologists – and even headlined on CNN – was perhaps collective Western guilt.
The view of the tree must have been ‘selfie’ heaven. I need to explore Northumbria, along with the operas of Havergal Brian. It’s allegedly a county that has gone unmolested by overdevelopment and still retains some wildness to offset our over-manicured southern-lowland landscapes. If the tree had hiked there itself, it could not have chosen a more picturesque spot.
I wager that most of the sycamore mourners will have got their basic knowledge of trees from the film of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s Ents, to be precise – giant, ancient trees which can uproot themselves to muster an army to come to the aid of men and hobbits, to vanquish the forces of darkness.
This reminds me of Alan Garner’s modern day ‘wizard of Alderley Edge’, Cadellin. He waits in his cave with his armed band of sleeping knights to save this country from its darkest hour. Actually, this is the darkest hour, and surely the moment to drive ‘numbnuts’ Starmer and co into the sea.
The sycamore thrives in the north and in agreeable groupings on bleak coastal farms in Anglesey. It’s a godsend to the landscape artist in areas where little else will grow. A simple blob of Hooker’s Green oil paint will suffice. But let us not forget the sycamore’s relatively recent introduction from Europe to this country, in the 15th century.
Smarmy southerners such as John Evelyn (1620-1706) would banish this tree from all ‘curious gardens’, pleasure grounds and avenues. London is full of sycamores. In the days when cars could be parked there, owners would return to find them coated with the noxious mucilage produced from the overly fecund tree.
The general reporting of the Sycamore Gap tree-felling incident was woeful for its lack of English history or tree lore, on both the BBC and ITN. It never fails to surprise me how de-natured our society is; how one sweatshirt-clad, loafer- wearing polytechnic ecologist after another was paraded before the cameras to point out how important the tree had been to wildlife, our mental health and
– dread word – ecosystem services. Had I been in charge of news
reporting, unblemished by a university education or a left-wing liberal bias, I would have got actor Toby Jones to dress up as William Blake and stand before the felled tree in period costume as the camera panned in on his anguished face.
We would switch to the churlish tree-feller Adam Carruthers protesting in bewilderment, ‘It was just a tree!’
Cue Toby Jones gesturing and quoting Blake:
‘The Tree, which moves some to tears of joy, is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature as all ridicule and deformity. And some scarce see nature at all. But, by the eyes of a man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.’
The two culprits, Daniel Graham and Carruthers, are waiting to be sentenced. in July. Ten years should give pause to ‘copycat’ criminals. Ten years inside will give the offenders time, when they are not slopping out or taking drugs delivered by drones, to read up on tree lore and tree law.
Northern actor/writer Stephen Graham happens to be a dead ringer for tree-feller Carruthers. Even now, Netflix might be approaching him to produce a drama to shed some light on what toxic cultural soup produced these monsters.
