If the mindless felling of the Sycamore Gap tree has taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing as “just a tree”, as one of the perpetrators, Adam Carruthers, told the jury. “It was almost as if someone had been murdered,” he said of the ensuing public outcry. For many it was.
Animism runs deeply through our relationship with arboreal life. From Macbeth’s prophetic Birnam Wood to the towering Ents in The Lord of the Rings, trees have long been personified in literature. And, from Constable’s bucolic Suffolk to David Hockney’s Yorkshire wold, they have helped shape Britain’s artistic landscape.
