If a Tree Falls, by Rosa Lyster

A woodcutter and his friend spent all their time together. The woodcutter, the elder of the two, lived alone; he had no family. The younger man, who made his living fixing things, had a partner and children. Everyone knew that the two were friends. The younger man had a workshop that he shared with two owls. He was there one day when the woodcutter arrived and asked to borrow a piece of string. The younger man refused. The world is full of pieces of string that are free to use, he said, but this one belongs to me. The woodcutter asked what made it special. The younger man took the string and carefully laid it in a ring on the floor. He told the woodcutter that the circumference of the circle corresponded exactly to the trunk of the most famous tree in the world.

Some time later, just before a harvest moon, there was a storm. The two men waited until it was dark, and then set off for the tree. Toward the end of their journey, the road narrowed. The woodcutter and his friend had to creep along a path that ran beside a wall, one of the oldest in the country. It was midnight, and they were carrying a saw. The storm was above their heads. They came upon the tree, which stood all alone. The woodcutter watched as his friend cut it down. The tree made the sound that all trees make when they fall, which some people think of as the noise of the hinge of life before the door is slammed. Leaving the tree lying on its side, the men went home.

A fairy tale, perhaps, but that is what happened. The owls, the string, the circle, the storm, the tree: all of it is true. In September 2023, in the middle of the Northumberland night, a mechanic named Adam Carruthers cut down a sycamore tree more than a century old that stood in a gap along an especially picturesque section of Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman fortification that runs across the narrowest part of England. A tree surgeon and ground worker named Daniel Graham filmed the felling, which was accomplished with a chainsaw in about three minutes. They carried a wedge from the tree’s trunk to the boot of Graham’s Range Rover and drove the forty minutes back home to Cumbria while the storm howled.

Early the next morning, a farmer called the Northumberland National Park to report that the tree was down. It had fallen over the wall, landing on its crown. The park ranger who arrived at the scene, a man named Gary Pickles, assumed at first that it had been blown down by the high winds the night before, until he saw the cleanness of the cut. “When you look and it’s gone, it’s just. . . . Oh my God,” he told the BBC. “Once you realize it’s been chopped down, then it’s going to become a massive worldwide story,” he said. The National Trust, the conservation charity that owns the site, issued a statement: “We are shocked and saddened to confirm that the famous Sycamore Gap Tree . . . has been felled overnight.” The police and crime commissioner for Northumbria described herself as “incandescent.” Journalists arrived before the police did.

It is not clear how Carruthers and Graham imagined the public would respond. The tree was a beloved landmark, its silhouette an instantly recognizable symbol of England’s North East. As virtually every news report would go on to stress, it had also been featured in the 1991 movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The two men must have anticipated that people in the area would be upset. It seems implausible, though, that they had in mind what actually ended up happening, which is that the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree made international news straightaway. It became one of the biggest stories in England, prompting a prolonged nationwide spasm of outrage and what sometimes looked like genuine grief.

It was as if there had been a cosmic violation. The lamentation went far beyond those with a personal link to the tree—everyone who had hiked there, or gotten engaged there, or scattered ashes there, or even seen it from their car as they drove by. People across the country spoke of slaughter, and compared its loss to that of a close family member, or to the death of Princess Diana. They cried and cried about it on the radio; they said they felt as if their hearts had been ripped out. They spoke of evil, and desecration, and named the fantastical medieval-seeming punishments they would like to see visited on the scumbags who could have done this. Alastair Campbell, one of the architects of Britain’s entry into the Iraq War, wrote that the tree’s loss had left “a scar in the hearts of the many, many people who have felt its majesty.” A celebrity chef posted online that a “sentinel of time” had been murdered. Kevin Reynolds, the director of Robin Hood, compared the felling to the destruction of the Big Dipper, and said that it was “the second loss Prince of Thieves has suffered in the last couple of years—Alan Rickman and now this.” (Rickman had played the Sheriff of Nottingham.)

Some people’s accounts of violent emotions seemed to come from a defensive place, as if to head off accusations that they might be losing their grip somewhat. In a blog post titled “How Can One Tree Mean So Much?,” Jamie Driscoll, the mayor for the area, wrote, “To those who say ‘it’s just a tree’ I would ask, is the Mona Lisa just a painting? Is Big Ben just another bell in a clock tower?” Reynolds conceded that “some people would say that you can’t compare the death of a tree to the death of a person, but I think some things are so iconic, so perfect in their being, that they have a profound effect.” He went even further: “So I think that this comparison is justified and I know Alan would agree with it.”

For about a month, nobody had any idea who had felled the tree, and nobody could work out why it had been done. Speculation at first turned to the usual explanations for why people cut down trees when they are not allowed to. I met one tree lawyer, Sarah Dodd, who characterized these motivations as having to do with “boundary disputes and neighbors hating one another because their trees are doing various things.” Soon after the felling, police arrested a former lumberjack who was fighting eviction from the area, as well as a sixteen-year-old boy, but both were released without charge. A nearby pub, the Twice Brewed Inn, which has a silhouette of the tree as its logo, offered a 1,500-pound reward, in the form of a bar tab, to anyone with information leading to an arrest.

Acting on a tip, the Northumbria police brought Carruthers and Graham in for questioning in October 2023. Six months later, the two men appeared at Newcastle Magistrates’ Court, walking in together, a unified front. They wore balaclavas, attempting to avoid the cameras outside the courthouse. In Graham’s case, the precaution was futile: pictures of his lined, guarded face, looking so much older than his late thirties, had already been widely circulated. The two men had been charged with criminal damage amounting to 623,335 pounds: 622,191 pounds for the sycamore and 1,144 pounds for the wall, in which two stones had been cracked. According to prosecutors, this extraordinarily specific figure was arrived at, in part, using the Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees (CAVAT) system, a method local governments use to calculate the worth of trees.

Graham pleaded not guilty, while Carruthers entered no plea. The district judge declined her jurisdictional prerogatives, saying that the case was too serious to be settled in a magistrates’ court and must be heard by a Crown Court, which deals with the most severe criminal offenses. In the intense media coverage that followed, reporters and commentators struggled to come up with plausible reasons why the two men, or indeed anyone on earth, would have felled the tree. Some sort of ancient act of revenge, or a grievance against the local government, possibly? Did we think Freud might have something to say about it? Was it a protest, perhaps, driven by very left-wing ideas or else very right-wing ones—a case could be made for either. The explanation, whatever the hell it might be, would surely emerge at trial.

The truth is that people in Britain don’t really like sycamores. Gardeners and foresters often go so far as to despise them. They are among the only trees in the country that are regularly referred to as weeds. They are prolific self-seeders: one mature tree can be the parent of thousands of seedlings in a single year. They can grow almost anywhere, and they do. In autumn, their leaves get all slimy underfoot. They attract bugs, which add to the sliminess, secreting a substance that is known, disgustingly, as honeydew. They are non-native, which some people have strong feelings about.

Even the Collins British Tree Guide, a standard reference text, singles them out for criticism. Most trees in the book are described in neutral terms: the shape of their crowns, the texture of their bark. The sycamore, on the other hand, is “much-hated” and “much-hacked.” The volume’s authors find something unsavory even in the tree’s hardiness, remarking that it is “strangely tough (considering its origins).”

The sycamore’s tendency to flourish in places where plenty of other trees would wither and die might have been the reason that John Clayton, a nineteenth-century landowner, planted one in a gap along Hadrian’s Wall. The wall, whose construction began in the year 122, was built to mark the northwestern boundary of the Roman Empire, serving as a frontier, customs post, and reminder of the reach of power. It is by far the most well-known Roman monument in Britain, familiar enough to be taken for granted, but it is a remarkable thing: a wall running for seventy-three miles across the neck of the country, through some of its most forbidding landscapes. You have to pity the legionnaires who built it—so far from home, so cold and wet every day.

Clayton, a solicitor from Newcastle upon Tyne, began buying land along the central section of the wall during the 1830s because he was alarmed that the Roman remains were being removed for use in new farm buildings and walls. He would buy up farms for the next sixty years; by 1890, nearly twenty miles of Hadrian’s Wall stood on land that he owned. The archaeologist Jim Crow has suggested that this was one of the first times in British history that land had ever been purchased for the sole purpose of archaeological conservation.

According to Historic England, which conducted a dendrochronological investigation (i.e., counting tree rings) after the sycamore was felled, it dates back to the late nineteenth century—confirming the theory that Clayton planted it, presumably because he thought it would look nice there. It must have: an isolated tree right in the middle of a dramatic dip in the landscape, the wall running steeply up each side of it, such that hikers could look down on it as they approached. Photographers went crazy for it—most reports on the felling have included the claim that it was the most photographed tree in Britain. As with the most photographed barn in America, it’s not clear how anyone would know this, but still. Steve Blair, the manager of the Twice Brewed Inn, which is about a twenty-minute walk from the tree, told me about the day he truly understood that it was gone: “It was the first snowfall. You’d get people taking photographs of the tree, because it’s covered in snow and . . . it’s like a skeleton of a tree. It looks so, so, so good. I was driving to work, and as I came over the hill, you would normally see the photographers all over Sycamore Gap.” He stretched out the fingers on both hands as wide as they would go and made them move like spiders’ legs, quickly, to suggest the photographers’ scurrying movements as they darted and snapped at the tree. “And then, on this specific day,” he said, “there was no one there anymore.”

There was also the Prince of Thieves aspect. I’d had my doubts about the enduring cultural relevance of this film, not really understanding how or why it could be such a significant factor in the way people felt about the Sycamore Gap tree, but Jim Crow set me straight. Crow, who spent most of the Eighties directing excavations along the section of the wall where the tree stood, told me that no one had seemed to care about the tree until the film came along. Before then, he said, “The tree wasn’t really recognized to have any real significance.” He went on, warily, evidently sensible of the fact that people would prefer to believe that the tree had been a beloved treasure from the day it had been planted: “As far as I’m aware, it wasn’t, let’s say, an iconic image of Hadrian’s Wall at that time. When the press wanted a photograph of the wall, there were other views that they would use.”

I only got to see the stump. The quickest way to get there is to walk the one thousand yards or so from the Steel Rigg Car Park, keeping to the path alongside the wall as it veers up and swoops down a succession of fiercely steep little hills. I visited in late spring, around the time that Carruthers and Graham’s trial was beginning. It was a public holiday, and very sunny. There were dozens of pedestrians on the path, some fit but many trudging the way I was, pausing at especially vertical bits to put their hands on their hips and mouth the word “hot” at one another. A number of small boys ran along the wall itself, which is about six feet high at that point and wide enough to accommodate two children abreast.

The remnants of the sycamore come into view as you get to the top of a slithery flight of stairs set into the bank, each step so shallow that you have to plant your feet sideways. Then you look down at the stump, which is in precisely the spot where it would have been good to come across a tree, a nice tall one with spreading branches, pretty old, standing totally alone in the landscape, looking like the idea of shelter. Before I saw the spot where it had stood, I hadn’t been able to come up with a satisfying reason why someone would do what Carruthers and Graham were accused of. From a distance, it had seemed only baffling. Up close, though, I could see exactly why they might have done it: because the tree had been special.

The Sycamore Gap trial began in late April, in Courtroom 1 of the Newcastle Law Courts, which sits overlooking the River Tyne. I arrived halfway through, as the prosecution’s questioning of Graham and Carruthers was under way. Between their first appearance in court and the trial, Graham had turned on Carruthers: both maintained their innocence, but Graham, in an anonymous phone call to the police, had pinned the blame on Carruthers. They were being represented separately. Carruthers was out on bail, but Graham had been remanded for his own protection after a suicide attempt five months earlier.

Given the public fervor about the case, the state’s decision about how to handle it should not have been a surprise. I was, nevertheless, surprised. A senior High Court judge, Justice Christina Lambert, had been appointed—High Court judges deal with only the most serious and complicated trials in England and Wales. Many of Lambert’s recent cases have involved grave crimes, of the sort that society considers unthinkable. In 2024, she was one of three senior judges appointed to consider the appeal of Lucy Letby, the pediatric nurse convicted of the murder of seven babies. The year before, Lambert had jailed a father for killing his two-month-old son. Richard Wright, the prosecutor appointed in the Sycamore Gap trial, had argued at least two cases before Lambert in the recent past. One involved the rape and murder of a young woman, the other the abduction and murder of a seven-year-old girl. Even at the start of the trial, there was talk of a prison sentence if the two men were found guilty. According to Sarah Dodd, the tree lawyer, it would be the first time anyone in the United Kingdom had gone to prison for cutting down a single tree.

The atmosphere in the courtroom was notably strange, somehow unsteady, as if gravity had been tampered with. On the press bench, reporters murmured to one another that it felt a bit like a murder trial. It didn’t, though, not exactly—nobody was dead, there were no grieving family members, and people in the public gallery kept laughing, to Lambert’s immense and theatrical disapproval (she had a way of peering over her spectacles). I kept laughing. I couldn’t seem to keep a handle on what was at stake, what law the two men had actually broken. Between sessions, I kept having to look up the legal definition of murder, to check one more time whether the term could be applied to anything other than the killing of a human being (it cannot). From the beginning it felt as if Carruthers and Graham were on trial for something other than property damage, but nobody seemed to have a name for what that might be.

Officially, the jury was being presented with a straightforward question of criminal damage: Were Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers responsible for cutting down a sycamore by Hadrian’s Wall on the night of September 27, 2023? Unfortunately for the defendants, this turned out to be exceptionally easy to answer. Despite their protestations of innocence, and despite Graham’s efforts to pin the whole thing on his former friend, it seemed immediately, starkly obvious that they had done it, and that they had done it together. It is hard to imagine how there could have been more evidence against them, short of the whole thing happening in broad daylight as a body of magistrates looked on.

To begin with, there was CCTV footage of the Range Rover driving to and from the Steel Rigg Car Park. Graham’s phone was tracked traveling to and from the site. On the same phone, the police recovered a nearly three-minute video, very dimly lit, of a small figure working at the trunk of a large tree, a chainsaw droning in the background, leaning his whole weight into the job until the crackling collapse began. They also recovered a photo of a tree wedge and a chainsaw in Graham’s trunk.

The two men had sent each other voice notes talking about the heaviness of the chainsaw and the amount of coverage that the crime was getting. In one of them, Graham seemed as if he would combust with elation, letting Carruthers know that the tree was “on fucking Sky News as we speak.” His voice quivered on the word “speak,” the way someone sounds just before they dissolve into laughter. Carruthers, already sounding scared, sent one to Graham: “ITV News, BBC News, Sky News, news, news, news.” They shared screenshots of Facebook posts discussing the tree and photos of news banners. In one screenshot, Carruthers circled a comment that read, “Judging by the quality of the cut and size of tree I would say whoever it was has knowledge of how to fell large trees.”

What else? Graham could not deny that he cut down trees for a living and spent a considerable amount of time handling chainsaws, but in an earlier police interview, Carruthers denied having ever cut down a tree and said that he thought chainsaws were “nasty things.” He maintained his denials in court when being cross-examined by Graham’s barrister, Christopher Knox, who then called up a video of Carruthers in a cherry picker, working confidently at the trunk of an ash tree. The moaning of the chainsaw filled the courtroom like the sound of a kicked beehive. Then there was a selfie Graham had taken, in which he is squinting into the camera looking pleased while, in the background, Carruthers once again saws away with evident expertise at the trunk of a large tree. There was a set of pictures that Graham had shown to the police—they came to be known as “the owl photographs”—which showed Carruthers in his workshop, grinning and holding a baby owl in each hand, with a collection of at least eight chainsaws behind him. It almost seems unfair at this point to continue, but Knox also produced a post on an online forum called All Things Chainsaw U.K. in which Carruthers sought parts.

Neither of the men held up well under questioning. It is strange to see people tell such brazen and low-effort lies in front of the international media and a High Court judge. Carruthers was by far the more amiable of the two, striving to seem tractable and reasonable while nevertheless lying flamboyantly. His approach throughout the trial was to state, over and over, that he had no idea who could have done it, none at all. He maintained an agreeably bewildered tone when presented with the accusations Graham had made against him, and kept it up throughout a grueling exchange about a man named Kevin Hartness, who had written, “Some weak people that walk this earth . . . disgusting behaviour,” under a post about the tree on Facebook. Whereupon Carruthers had sent a voice note to Graham about it, muttering, “I’d like to see Kevin Hartness launch an operation like we did last night. . . . I don’t think he’s got the minerals.”

Under questioning from Wright, the prosecutor, Carruthers explained that the way the voice note had been “interpreted” was inaccurate, that he hadn’t said “launch an operation like we did”: he had said “launch an operation like he did.” “He” being the person who had cut down the tree, obviously, someone other than Adam Carruthers. Wright had a way of gnawing on the arms of his spectacles during cross-examination when he wanted to broadcast his incredulity to the jury. Throughout the Kevin Hartness interlude, he chewed on them as if to wear the paint off, while Carruthers remained polite. He brought up his partner, Amy, and two young children often. She never came to court, but a couple of his apparent relatives regularly turned up in the gallery, and in between sessions they would stand together near the windows overlooking the river, their backs to the journalists. Carruthers seemed basically ordinary. He looked scared.

Graham was different, a character from another moral universe altogether. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a person radiate scorn more thoroughly than he did. He seemed contemptuous of everything: trees, other people, the concept of truth. He made a point of mentioning how alone he was in the world—and how fine he was with this state of affairs. The press box in Courtroom 1 is directly behind the witness stand, so I couldn’t see his face as he spoke, but he still managed to make the back of his skinny, tattooed neck convey the suggestion that we all go fuck ourselves.

He would have made Dostoevsky’s head explode. He lied beyond the point of sense or even reason, conceding that, yes, that was his car at the site, and, yes, the video of the tree being sawed down was on his phone, but that none of this proved a thing. Access to the Range Rover was unrestricted, he said. He left the keys in the car, for the use of anyone who happened to be passing by. Carruthers could have taken it. In a police interview, Graham had provided other possibilities: a stranger from nearby Carlisle, or his stepdaughter’s boyfriend (as far as I’m aware, he doesn’t have a stepdaughter), or his “bird’s cousin.” He said he had “no interest” in sycamores: “I cut down trees, I don’t collect them.”

Graham seemed to hate Wright in particular. His neck reddened when the prosecutor approached him, and he would roll his shoulders back in their sockets, the way men do when they are squaring up to hit someone. In response to yes-or-no questions from Wright, Graham would say “possibly,” as when Wright asked him if he agreed that he sounded pleased with himself in a voice note in which he said that the tree felling had “gone viral.” Sometimes he replied with questions of his own, as when Wright asked why he had searched for “image after image” of the tree, and what his interest was in it, and Graham said, “What was everyone in the world’s interest in it?” When backed into a corner, truth-wise, he accused Wright of trying to wind him up or to make him look stupid. Where Carruthers appeared intimidated, and almost frantic in his efforts to please, Graham vibrated with irritation, barking that he had “had enough of being called a liar.” He listened intently when Carruthers was on the stand, closing his eyes long-sufferingly whenever his former friend told a particularly outrageous lie. He never looked anything less than disgusted.

Not everything Graham said came across as a fabrication that could be dismantled on the spot. He appeared sincere, for instance, when talking about his father’s suicide, and about how he and Carruthers had become friends: Carruthers had helped him fix his father’s Land Rover in time for the funeral. He also didn’t seem to be lying, exactly, when it came to the matter of the string. Under questioning, he explained that he had first heard of the sycamore sometime in 2021, when he had gone into Carruthers’s workshop and asked if he could borrow the mythic piece of string. Carruthers refused, saying that the string had great sentimental meaning for him. Then he really did lay it in a circle and tell Graham that its circumference exactly matched that of the trunk of the most famous tree in the world.

Nobody could quite work out what to do with this story. Lawyers for both sides kept bringing it up, but no one seemed clear on how the information ought to be used. Neither man was pressed about where the string was now, for instance, and when Carruthers denied knowing anything about it, the lawyers dropped it, perhaps understanding how insane they would sound if they pursued the issue. Knox, Graham’s lawyer, attempted to pin Carruthers down on the subject during an exchange about whether Carruthers had “a thing about the tree” (in his closing argument, Knox would memorably describe it as “the tree about which [you] had some sort of thing”), but he failed to get much purchase.

It was too weird a detail to be useful in a courtroom, but it was also too weird to ignore, because it didn’t seem like something that a person would just invent. If he’d simply wanted to account for how he had learned of the tree’s existence, Graham could have said that Carruthers had showed him a photo of the sycamore on his phone, or that they had chatted about it at any point during their yearslong friendship. He could have said almost anything, in fact, instead of this otherworldly business about a piece of string that contained within it the essence of a beloved tree, like something out of the Brothers Grimm.

The story of the string made a small but significant contribution to the unmistakable feeling of imbalance in the courtroom, the sense that the crime that had actually taken place was not necessarily the one being tried. A piece of string that calls forth a tree comes from the same genre as poisoned apples, or a nose that starts to grow when you lie—a detail from a folktale, or a myth, or any other type of story in which the cutting down of an extraordinary tree turns out to have world-shattering consequences. It didn’t belong in a courtroom, but there it was, reverberating alongside all the other details that nobody knew what to do with and the questions that seemed beyond the court’s ability to address. What is a person actually guilty of when they cut down a famous tree for no reason that anyone can name, other than malice? What is the nature of the injury? Who are the victims? What is the appropriate punishment?

It often felt as if the most important question in the courtroom was not whether Graham and Carruthers had done it but whether they—or anyone—understood what it was that they had done. There was a kind of collective effort to affirm that something terrible had happened, much worse than ordinary criminal damage. (Even Graham’s lawyer referred to the “Sycamore Gap tree murderer.”) How else to account for the ferocity of the public indignation? It may have been easier to establish that something very grave had taken place if anyone had been able to agree on the financial value of the sycamore, but it turned out that CAVAT was not the appropriate instrument for measuring its worth. CAVAT is used by local governments when setting their tree budgets for the year; it calculates the value of urban trees by assessing factors like visibility (how many people walk under a tree per day, how many people see it from their bedroom windows) and the amount of shade they provide. It doesn’t work for one standing by itself in the middle of nowhere.

The prosecution, which had initially gone out of its way to emphasize the tree’s precise financial value (622,191 pounds), stopped citing this figure partway through the trial, and did not elaborate on how it had been calculated. Toward the end of the trial, lawyers began to insinuate that it was in fact members of the press who had disseminated this nonsensical sum, in their endless quest for sensationalism. Never mind. Between them, the lawyers and the judges agreed that the only financial figure that mattered was 5,000 pounds, which is the threshold for considering a significant prison sentence in cases of criminal damage.

The effort to establish that terrible harm had been done had to rely on less straightforward means of valuation. Often, this came in the form of suggestions from the prosecutors that the sycamore had not actually been a tree at all. At one point, Carruthers said that the reason he had been googling “Sycamore Gap” so incessantly was that he hadn’t been able to understand what all the fuss was about—like someone had been murdered. “My understanding,” he said, “was that it was just a tree.”

Wright and Knox both seized on this, bringing it up as often as they could. “What you thought was just a tree,” Wright said, “was in fact global news.” Carruthers had believed it was only a tree, but, Wright continued, the rest of the world had thought that its felling was “a terrible and wicked thing” to do and “something that right-thinking people were upset about.” Knox exclaimed to the jury in his closing speech: “Six days into this trial, which has absorbed so much publicity, so much excitement, so much attention, and he said”—pointing at Carruthers—“it was just a tree.”

In strictly legal terms, of course, it did not matter what Carruthers thought it was. His opinions about what it represented were not evidence that he had cut it down. They had no bearing at all on the matter of his guilt, as his lawyer tried in vain to remind the jury during his closing argument: “This case is not about the emotions we all feel at the loss of that tree. It’s not about public outrage. It’s about evidence.” Nobody was buying this. Criminal damage was the charge, but public emotion and outrage were what the case was about, and everybody in the courtroom knew it. The question of what the sycamore represented was precisely the reason we were there.

The jury deliberated longer than we expected. On Thursday morning, in a break between sessions, one of the court clerks popped her head round the door and announced that we would be observing a moment of silence at midday. It took me a beat to understand that this was because of V-E Day, and not because we were being asked to participate in some kind of druid-inflected exercise about how best to honor a tree. Closing arguments finished shortly after that, and there was confidence on the press bench that the whole thing would be over by lunchtime. The jury did not oblige, though, and we were all back on Friday, waiting on the chairs outside the courtroom, fiddling around with our ledes.

The jury returned late that morning. Neither of the defendants reacted at all when the guilty verdicts were read out.

When I talked to people about the trial, their responses fell into three categories. The first and rarest category involved sotto voce confessions of personal tree-felling or maiming episodes. A friend told me that she and her twin sister used to sneak out at night to a graveyard, where they would kick steadily at a yew sapling, hoping to stunt its growth. Another confided that in high school he had once chopped down a tree in a forest while very drunk. In case you think this is all just teenagers being teenagers: rest assured that there are certain dads in certain prosperous areas of London who would have a lot to answer for should the authorities come poking around asking questions about the sudden death of certain light-blocking trees. The second, slightly more frequent response was of the “Why does the world have to be this way?” variety. Why does it sometimes happen that you get a pair of guys like this? Overwhelmingly, though, the most common response was to seek confirmation of their suspicions that Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers were morons. They always said that—“morons,” or else “mindless,” or else “absolutely mindless and brain-dead, no?” Wright even used the idea in his opening remarks, describing the incident as a “moronic mission.” He could get florid like that. He also said that the pair had indulged in “the arboreal equivalent of mindless thuggery” (which, if you think about it, seems to suggest trees beating each other up or throwing rocks through windows).

Almost everybody said something along these lines, and this started to seem very strange, because I have never heard of a moron doing something like this before. In the annals of moronic behavior, driving forty minutes out of your way in the middle of the night in order to secretly and skillfully cut down everybody’s favorite tree does not come up. People seemed to badly want that to be the case, though; they wanted to believe that Carruthers and Graham had done it because they were very stupid, or not thinking at all. I could understand why. The alternative and obvious explanation—that they had thought about it quite extensively—is much more disturbing.

In literature and myth, people don’t cut down or otherwise mess with proscribed trees because they are idiots. They do it because they cannot help themselves, because it is like hammering away on a big red button with a sign above it that says do not press. They do it because they know that it is bad. In Augustine’s Confessions, interfering with a special tree is a metaphor for sin itself. He recounts stealing pears from a neighbor’s tree, just for the pleasure of doing wrong: “For, having plucked them, I threw them away, my sole gratification in them being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy.” The enjoyment, he says, “was not in those pears, it was in the crime itself, which the company of my fellow-sinners produced.”

Biblically speaking, unsanctioned action regarding a tree is where all the trouble began. I am ashamed to admit that it took me two whole days in court before I registered that one of the defendants was named Adam. You could argue very easily, in fact, that the foundational question of Judeo-Christian thought is “Why did they have to do that to that tree?” Adam and Eve knew what they were doing, of course. They knew that the tree was sacred, that they were not supposed to mess with it on any account, but they did it anyway, because such is the nature of temptation.

There is something primal about the idea of extreme punishment being visited on those who tamper with special trees. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves claims that in medieval Ireland, the penalty for cutting down a sacred tree was death. He says also that “poetry itself declines” and “the sanctity of the grove is annulled” when the value of illegally felled trees can be expressed in terms of cash compensation, rather than in terms of people being executed or perhaps ripped apart by wild dogs. The White Goddess is not a reliable historical source—Graves determinedly misread an amazing range of documents, and made up all sorts of things out of thin air—but he loved the idea. So did James George Frazer, who recounts in The Golden Bough the punishment that awaited fifteenth-century Germans who stripped off the bark of trees:

The culprit’s navel was to be cut out and nailed to the part of the tree which he had peeled, and he was to be driven round and round the tree till all his guts were wound about its trunk . . . It was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree.

There is no evidence that this ever happened. Still, the story is repeated.

A similar claim is often made that forest courts in England, which were in place from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, were especially bloodthirsty, cutting the limbs off even minor offenders against the forest. Oliver Rackham, the great historian of the British countryside, devoted a not insubstantial portion of his career to rebutting this claim, noting that there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that these punishments were ever carried out. The typical penalty was a fine. And to this day, despite what people might wish, the fact is that when a tree gets cut down, special or otherwise, the deed goes more or less unpunished.

Carruthers and Graham were sentenced in July. Before the sentencing, a junior counsel presented a “victim impact statement” compiled by Andrew Poad, the general manager of the National Trust’s Hadrian’s Wall properties. This consisted of emails and messages from members of the public, read in a loud, slow, tragic voice. She tried her best. They said things like “I’ve never felt this way about any other tree” and “This feels like losing a close family member” and “How dare he steal our joy” and “RIP BEAUTIFUL TREE I WISH I’D GOT TO MEET YOU.”

The attempt at solemnity was not especially successful. The courtroom took on a carnival atmosphere, fueled mainly by an elderly woman who had traveled for hours to watch the sentencing. She was sitting in the front row of the public gallery, stage-whispering to the nearby reporters that she hoped the two men would get at least five years in prison, and that her husband was hoping for worse than that, “if you know what I mean.” She had befriended two of Carruthers’s relatives outside the courtroom and seemed to be enjoying herself immensely. I heard her explain to five reporters clustered around her that the reason everyone had been so upset about the tree was that the wall had been built around it, that it had stood for nearly two thousand years before Carruthers had to come and chop it up for no reason. None of them wrote it down, but they all bent over their notebooks to record her announcement that she was “absolutely disgusted” at what those two men had done. And for what?

She did not simmer down even when Justice Lambert entered and began reading her remarks at a rapid, toneless clip. Graham and Carruthers were each given four years and three months in prison. The old woman shook her head in dismay, and mouthed “I am disgusted” at a reporter from the BBC. The sentence, Lambert said, was based on a consideration of “the social impact of the offense.” People had loved the tree, she said, and Carruthers and Graham had destroyed it in an act of vandalism that was somehow both mindless and premeditated. Their motivations for doing so were not totally clear, she said, but she was confident that “sheer bravado” had entered into it.

The funny thing is, they did say why they had done it. In pre-sentencing interviews with their probation officers, both men had finally come clean. Carruthers said that he had been blackout drunk, and realized what he had done only the next day. Graham said that he had just been keeping Carruthers company, and realized what was happening only when the saw touched the tree. Of course, nobody believed them, not even the judge, who called their accounts “not plausible.” The question of what it was they had actually done, and why they would have done it, remained unanswered. The piece of string was never found.