Sycamore: a story about a tree and a symbol of endurance

The once-iconic sycamore tree at a gap in Hadrian’s Wall

There is a fairy tale that goes: “Once upon a time, there was …

…a woodcutter and his friend [who] 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.

Well, no. This is not a traditional fairy tale as might have come down to us from the Brothers Grimm. It is the opening lines of a superb article by Rosa Lyster [Endnote 1] in which she writes about one of the most senseless acts of vandalism of modern times: the felling of a beautiful sycamore tree at a gap in Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, England in 2023.  

It is nevertheless a ‘grim” story – but luckily there are both downsides and upsides to it, as I will now recount.

But first a word on Hadrian’s Wall

I always wanted to visit and explore Hadrian’s Wall, that incredible and enduring example of Roman engineering.  I did get close once, but I was not in control of the agenda that day and we went off to look at a spruce plantation instead. “Never mind”, I consoled myself. One day I would be back. Not just back, but back with boots, a crib, a map, camera and guidebook, and a week with nothing else to do but walk the wall, re-live its history, and drink in the wonderful way it fits into a beautiful landscape.

Hadrian’s Wall: 80 Roman miles in length, crossing the breadth of England, begun in AD122 and completed six years later

But there was to be no coming back. The roads of life diverged, one road led on to another, and then another, as diverging roads do. The nearest I came was owning a small stone, about the size of a matchbox, brought back to Australia by my father as a memento of his exploration of Hadrian’s Wall when he lived in England in the 1930s, and which he passed on to me. For years all through my childhood and teens I treasured that stone and then, somewhere along one of those diverging roads, it was lost. Nor is it likely to be replaced; collecting pieces of Hadrian’s Wall is no doubt frowned upon these days, and rightly so. Things were different in my father’s day.

The stone was lost, but my fascination with the wall has never abated. Like so many others, one of my favourite images was of the sycamore tree at a gap in the wall in Northumberland. It was the quintessential tree: tall and symmetrical, fitting perfectly into a dip in the land, framed by the famous stones. It was equally beautiful when leafless in winter as it was in its full summer garb.

Winter tracery

And then there is the poetry and mythology of sycamore trees to consider, all adding to the legend and intrigue of the Wall and its sentinel. This sentinel was archetypically “in place”. In Britain, sycamore trees are often found in exposed, wind-swept spots, or shading a remote farmstead. They are accustomed to being lone trees in harsh places, just as this one was. As an anonymous poet wrote:

O! for the shade of the sycamore

That spreadeth its boughs at my cottage door …

... O! for my cottage by the sea

And the peaceful shade of the sycamore tree.

Like everyone, I was outraged when I read that the famous Hadrian’s Gap tree (in 2016 it was England’s Tree of the Year, no less) had been felled in an act of mindless vandalism.  Actually, “outrage” didn’t seem to cut it – when I read of the reaction of a local who said she was “incandescent with anger and sorrow”, this just about described the way many of us felt … and not just in Northumberland, or even just in England, but all around the world.

After the initial gulp of shock, my first thought was “I hope they get the bastards”. My second thought was “I hope that when they get the bastards, they will be condemned to planting sycamore trees and nurturing them for the rest of their days”. My third thought (well, I am a forester) was: can the tree be reproduced from its progeny? Will it self-regenerate by coppicing from its stump? Is this the end of the Hadrian’s Gap tree, or will it once again grace the iconic scene?

In the meantime, as the world now knows, they did get the bastards. It turned out that the perps were not just deranged, but deranged and stupid, and they actually dobbed each-other in. I was very pleased to hear that they had been apprehended, and also later to hear that they had been sent to gaol … although even that was letting them off lightly in my opinion. I rethought my idea of sentencing and decided that planting sycamores in the lovely landscapes of rural Britain was too soft. Instead, I now decided, they should be sent as convicts to plant and water cork oak seedlings in North Africa, ten hours a day and seven days a week for ten years, under the supervision of unforgiving and hard-driving overseers.

But two good things have come of all this: First, from a personal point of view, I realised I did not know enough about sycamore trees and that if I was to follow future events at the gap in Hadian’s Wall I needed to do some arboreal homework. Specifically, I needed to know more about the English sycamore tree. The second upside was my pride for the professional response from foresters and horticulturalists to the calamity. They have not just done their job, and done it very well, but provided the world with a sense of optimism, a happy and confident expectation that recovery, albeit some years hence, is assured.

In case anyone asks: are there sycamores in Australia?

I don’t think I have ever knowingly seen a sycamore tree growing in Western Australia, certainly we have no native sycamores, but it is possible they have been introduced and planted in some urban garden or arboretum. On the other hand, I know that they are widespread in the cooler and mistier parts of Victoria and Tasmania – indeed they are more widespread in these parts than believed appropriate. The seeds were brought to Australia from England by the early settlers for planting as specimen trees in parks and gardens or in wind-blasted spots on the coast, and they have spread unrestrainedly, to the extent that they are now regarded by environmentalists as a weed, spreading into home gardens and cultivated fields.

Australia does have one native tree called “sycamore”. This is the ‘Sycamore Fig’ that occurs in Queensland, a magnificent specimen of which adorns the Botanic Gardens in Brisbane, said to be over 150 years old. It is actually a fig tree, not a “true” sycamore … but then again, is there such a thing as a “true” sycamore?  

A case in point: the American sycamores

Several tree species called ‘sycamore’ grow naturally in North America. The most common is the American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), also known as the American Plane Tree, or sometimes Buttonwood Tree. It is a large and beautiful tree which can reach a great size and age. No lesser American than George Washington recorded an American Sycamore measuring 13.67m in circumference, and elsewhere I have read of them reaching 40m in height.

An American Sycamore in Pennsylvania

The American sycamore is the subject of a famous poem by Wendell Berry, a reflection on the beauty of the tree, and also its resilience. The poem reads in part:

 …in the place that is my own place, whose earthI am shaped in and must bear, t

here is an old tree growing,a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,hacks and whittles cut in it,

the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it ...

The famous Liberty Tree in Boston is said to have been a sycamore (although some contrarians say it was an elm). This is the tree under which, in colonial times, Bostonians gathered to protest against unfair taxes imposed from afar by the British parliament. At these meetings, under this tree, the revolution leading to the creation of the USA was fomented.  But irrespective of whether it was an elm or sycamore, there is an irony surrounding the fate of this tree, given events at Hadrian’s Gap, 250-odd years later. According to Eric Rutkow [2]:

One of the earliest casualties [of the American War of Independence] was the original Liberty Tree … that had enlivened the Boston mobs a decade before. A party of British soldiers decided in August 1775 that they needed to fell the tree that gave the rebels so much inspiration. According to a newspaper account “After a long Spell of laughing and grinning, sweating, swearing and foaming, with Malice diabolical, they cut down [the] tree, because it bore the Name of Liberty”.

The phrase “with malice diabolical” rings true today, just as it did then.

My little Guide to Familiar American Trees, purchased in Seattle in 1965 when I first arrived in the USA, and which I still consult from time to time, has a page on the three American sycamores and some nice artwork:

Excerpt from Guide to American Trees

Back to Britain and the “English sycamore”

There is nothing quite like the rich panoply of north American trees – I could wax lyrical on the subject for many an hour, boring even the most ardent dendrologist. However, this story is really about the sycamore tree of Great Britain, the compatriots of that doomed beauty at Hadrian’s Wall, and it is time I got back on track.

The first thing to say is that the English sycamore (botanical name (Acer pseudoplataus) is a maple not a plane tree as are the American sycamores. The second is that it is not native to Britain. The tree occurs naturally in nearby Europe (where they go by other names) but never made it across the channel on its own steam, as it were. Some authorities say the tree was taken to Britain by the Romans (who introduced the chestnut and hazel to Britain, planting them alongside roads as fodder and food for marching centurions), others that the sycamore arrived much later, perhaps in the 15^th or 16^th century. Checking with H.L. Edlin [3], my go-to for anything to do with British trees, I read:

The sycamore, or great maple, Acer pseudoplatanus, has become so common in our woods and hedgerows that it is hard to realise that it is an introduced tree, with perhaps 400 years of history behind it in these islands. It is native to central Europe, reaching as far west as France, and was first brought over as an ornamental tree for gardens. Apparently it became popular during the great eighteenth century wave of tree planting on the big estates, and as a result we have [in the 1950s] about 88,000 acres of sycamore woods, of which some 65,000 are of the valuable High Forest form, accounting for about 3 per cent of all High Forest woodland.

A shapely sycamore at home in rural England – watercolour by W. Boot RBA in Boulger’s Familiar Trees

Edlin also deals with the name:

The name of “sycamore”, for this tree, is peculiar to England; it means “fig mulberry” and derives from the mistaken belief that it is the sycomorus of Biblical lands. The Scots, however, call it the “plane”, through confusion with quite another Mediterranean tree. To complete the mix-up, in North America the true planes are called “sycamores”! But everything is clear if one remembers that the English sycamore is simply one of the maples, of the large botanical genus Acer.

That great writer on trees G.S. Boulger [4] elaborates. He tells us that the Fig Mulberry (Ficus sykamorus) of Scripture, according to the mystic code of symbolism of flowers, signifies:

…  ‘curiosity’, because it is identified with the tree on which Zacchseus climbed that he might see Christ at His triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This confusion is said to have led to a considerable planting of this species by religious persons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries” …

But as Edlin points out, the English sycamore is a maple, not a fig, notwithstanding the beliefs of ‘religious persons’  [5].

Putting aside the confusion over the name, trees called ‘sycamore’ have a significant place in many ancient cultures and religions.  There are traditions in Celtic, Egyptian, Norse, Native American, and Christian mythologies, in all of which the sycamore variously symbolises strength, protection, hope and rebirth.

This spiritual reputation has endured into modern society, where the tree is today regarded as representing endurance and the capacity to survive hardship. I like this. It gives me confidence that the sycamore at Hadrian’s Gap will have a second coming.

Some basic botany (non-foresters can skip this bit)

The English sycamore is a large, broad-leaved deciduous tree, often seen in coastal situations because it tolerates exposure to icy winds and salt-spray.

Boulger tells us:

Sycamore is a very common forest tree in central Europe, and grows as a native no farther away than the outskirts of Paris. But in prehistoric times it failed to spread across the Channel to England and it was unknown here until some unrecorded date in the Middle Ages. Once it arrived, it throve and established itself firmly in our woodlands, and it now behaves just like a native tree. The well-known winged seeds enable it to spread rapidly, and as it bears heavy seed crops every yea. Its seedlings often become a nuisance to gardeners.

The leaf and flower of the English sycamore

According to Edlin: “…everyone is familiar with [the sycamore’s] very typical winged seeds, set in pairs, which twizzle to the ground, revolving like the wings of a helicopter, every autumn”.  As  the esteemed forestry scholar Ian Bevege has pointed out, the technical term “twizzle” is not heard nearly often enough these days.

Perhaps some people do regard the sycamore as a weed, but in reality it is a handsome tree, especially when grown in the open in a park or standing alone on a bare hillside. It forms a magnificent crown of lustrous green foliage soaring up to form a rounded dome, and in winter, after leaf fall, the beautiful architecture of the limbs is strikingly revealed.

A sycamore in an English park, in mid-summer

The same tree in winter (both photographs courtesy of Susan Herriot) [6]

The summer sycamore is famous for its cool shade, and then for its autumn colours. But, as Boulger has written, “one regrets to see in them the early symptoms of coming autumn, when the tree appears, as Cowper says,

  .. capricious in attire:

Now green, now tawny, and ‘ere autumn yet

Has chang’d the woods, in scarlet honours bright."

 Another digression: sycamore timber

English sycamore has exceptionally fine timber. It is strong, hard and dense, almost dead-white, and takes a gleaming polish. It was once prized for furniture-making and favoured by woodcarvers for bowls, platters, and spoons. Industrially, it was the preferred timber for mangle rollers and spindles (for neither of which there is much call today). Occasionally a mature tree has timber with a 'ripple' or 'fiddle-back' figure; this can be veneered and used for the backs of violins and cellos. The timber also makes excellent charcoal, and this was once prized for the manufacture of gunpowder (another mostly obsolete use).

Perhaps the most romantic use of sycamore is the traditional Welsh ‘love spoon’. These beautifully carved wooden spoons are offered to one’s lady as a romantic gesture and a symbol of undying love … a tradition that does continue into modern times.

A superbly carved Welsh Love Spoon, made from English sycamore

Like all the maples, the sap of the sycamore tree is rich in sugar. This was once fermented into wine, another traditional use now in decline; at least I have not seen Chateau Sycamore in my local wine shop recently. The flowers are sugary (bees love the nectar and make it into tasty honey) as are the leaves. The excretion of aphids that feed upon the sugary leaves falls like snow and is called “honey-dew”, or sometimes “manna from heaven”.

Moreover, Boulger notes that:

… a further use of sycamore is as a shelter tree. It is very windfirm, and it will face up to the very worst exposure, either inland or near the sea. In northern England, and also in North Wales, sycamores have often been planted to shelter the most exposed, stone-built upland farmsteads. The northernmost woodland in Britain is a plantation of sycamores on the Queen Mother’s estate at the Castle of Mey, on the very exposed north coast of Caithness.

My Grandfather’s 1890 National Encyclopedia – A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge (Vol IX) puts it very nicely, noting of the English sycamore:

…there is scarcely any tree more universally cultivated for the sake of the striking effect it produces, whether as a single tree or planted in avenues or in masses. It thrives upon poor gravelly or sandy soil, especially near the sea where few other trees succeed; and will even bear the smoke of London …

Yet another digression: the Tolpuddle Tree

Large trees have long served as rural meeting places for protestors, revolutionaries or political movements. One of the most famous in England is a massive sycamore tree growing in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle.

The historic sycamore tree in the village of Tolpuddle

The story is this: In 1833 six farm workers, angry at the way in which their wages were steadily declining, gathered under the tree to share their concerns and see if they could find a solution. They agreed to form an organization which they called the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, an early form of trades union. The word got around and numerous farm workers joined the new Society. Their key demand was for a minimum wage of 10 shillings a week, and when this was not forthcoming, they refused to work, in effect going on strike. The landowners tried to call their bluff, but they were resolute. Striking was not an actual crime, but the enraged landowners were politically powerful and controlled the legal system. In February 1834 the Society’s six founders were arrested, taken to court and convicted under an obscure piece of legislation that forbade the swearing of secret oaths. They were sentenced to transportation and seven years of hard labour in Australia.

Surprisingly, as those were the days when many people convicted of trivial offenses were “sent to Botany Bay”, there arose a public outcry, driven by a strong sense that the Tolpuddle Martyrs were the victims of a great injustice. Two years later, and after one of the first political marches in UK history, the martyrs were pardoned. They returned home as popular heroes but had lost faith in the mother country. Five of the six emigrated to Canada where they were able to become landowners and farmers in their own right.

The sycamore tree under which the Tolpuddle Martyrs first met still stands today.

 Back to the Hadrian’s Gap sycamore

The outcry over the felling of the Hadrian’s Gap sycamore is especially interesting given that sycamore is not an overly popular tree in Britain.  Rosa Lysta sums up this view:

The truth is that people in Britain don’t really like sycamores … 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 unsavoury even in the tree’s hardiness, remarking that it is “strangely tough (considering its origins).”

This seems to me to be seriously unprofessional, but not so surprising. I have many times spoken with environmentalists in Australia who hate all exotic (introduced) trees and regard them as weeds. To me, all trees ae beautiful, although some can be planted in the wrong spot, and commercial plantations (for example of maritime pine) have many values other than timber, including important wildlife habitat.

But having said that, the outpouring of grief over the destruction of the Hadrian’s Wall sycamore was immense and heart-felt. Perhaps this would have been the case even had the tree been an oak, a chestnut or an elm. The fact that it was a sycamore was probably not important in itself; the tree had become a symbol, an icon, and was well-known even to people who did not know it was a sycamore. The fact that it featured in a popular movie about Robin Hood undoubtedly increased its heritage status. In short, practically everybody knew this tree. It had a cultural as well as a silvicultural identity.

How did the tree get there? Rosa Lyster explains:

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 ...

… 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 [the 1890s] —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.

The denouement: good news.

The UK National Trust, who “own” Hadrian’s Wall, and thus the Hadrian’s Gap sycamore, came to the party with professional alacrity. Within a day of the felling of the tree, the Trust’s foresters had collected seed and clonal material (buds and cuttings) from the tree and sent these off to be propagated. The remains of the tree were lifted away and a protective fence constructed around the stump.

The results of the Trust’s efforts have been outstanding. Firstly, the stump has coppiced (sent out new shoots). Within months of the bastardry, I read on the National Trust website:

Signs of new life have been found growing from the stump of the felled Sycamore Gap tree … eight new shoots have emerged from the base of the stump, giving hope that the historic tree lives on, 10 months after it was illegally cut down.

National Trust officer inspecting new shoots emerging from the stump of the felled tree (photo courtesy of UKNT)

If the new shoots survive and are looked after, they will eventually grow into another fine tree of exactly the same DNA. Initially it might not look the same as the parent tree, but over time (say, 150 years) with judicious pruning, it should be indistinguishable. It is normal practice in these situations to “single” the coppice once it has become well established – this involves selecting the best and firmest of the new saplings growing from the old stump. This is retained and the others removed, so that eventually you have a tree with a single trunk, rather than a clump of trunks.

Further, the National Trust reports that the clonal material collected from the felled tree has been successfully cultured/grafted and is already growing into new little saplings. These are also an exact genetic replica of the parent tree, and can be planted out as “reserves”, as it were, should the stump coppice fail.

Cuttings from the Hadrian’s gap sycamore grafted onto rootstock

Two months later, the cuttings bursting with life, exact genetic replicas of the famous tree (both photos courtesy of the UK National Trust)

And finally, there are trays of seedlings. It is hard to know how successful these will be. There is a risk that the seed was “selfed” (the same tree being both the mother and father of the new seedlings) which nearly always produces weaker progeny. However, sycamore pollen is carried long distances on the wind, and for all I know there are other sycamores in the region, and these will have fathered the new seedlings. I expect that these will be easily grown into mature trees. If pollinated by a different father, the seedlings will not be genetically identical to the original tree, but all will have the same mother (foresters call them ‘half-siblings’). They will provide both a reserve for the ‘new’ Hadrian’s Gap tree, and also seedlings for symbolic plantings elsewhere in Britain (indeed in the world – I will talk to my mate Jack Bradshaw and see if he can get one to plant at The Foresters Wood at Manjimup, allowing Western Australians to pay homage).

A truly lovely sight: one of the first seedlings germinated from seed collected from the Hadrian’s Gap sycamore (photo courtesy of the UK National Trust).

We know from Boulger that sycamore:

… is a tree of rapid growth, reaching a good height in a short time. Trees ten years old are recorded as attaining twenty-five or twenty-eight feet [10 m] in height, whilst the species comes to its full growth of from fifty to sixty feet [20m] at an age of as many years.

We also know that members of the maple family of trees, as is the English sycamore, mostly coppice successfully, and that for centuries maples used for the extraction of sugars for making into maple syrup have been managed by coppicing. We know that it can be done, and we know how to do it.

All of this gives me confidence that the beloved tree at Hadrian’s Gap, so cruelly maltreated, will not just survive, but will prosper, a true symbol of endurance and resilience. I will not see it, but my Great Granddaughter, Little Ellen, a beauty like her namesake, might one day read this story in her family archives, and then when she is 21, she will make a pilgrimage to Northumberland and to the tree, where she will give it my regards.

I conclude with a lovely poem The Lone Sycamore by Patricia Walter. Having reached the winter of my own life, stripped of youth and with no disguise to hide behind, I look to the sycamore, as I have looked to many trees over the years, to inspire me when the light fades.

Endnotes

1.      This imagined fairy story comes from a wonderful article called “If a Tree Falls” by Rosa Lyster in Harper’s Magazine, January 2026. The article deals in detail with the motive of the Hadrian’s Wall vandals, the public and legal response, and the trial. I thank Constancia Lombard for bringing it to my attention.

2.      Eric Rutkow is the author of American Canopy (Simon and Schuster, 2012), a fascinating account of the part that trees and forests have played in American history. 

3.      Edlin, H.L. (1956): Trees, Woods and Man (Collins, Great Britain). This is my favourite book about British trees and forests, and about their interaction with society over the years. Edlin is a forester’s forester: he knows his trees, he knows the woods and he writes beautifully.

4.      Boulger G.S. (1880): Familiar Trees (Wavely Book Company, London). This is a set of three very handsome books, leather-bound and with numerous colour plates, with chapters on all the well-known trees found in the British Isles (including sycamore). My set was found about 30 years ago in a second-hand bookshop in Fremantle by my wife Ellen, who then gave them to me as a birthday present, becoming a treasured possession.

5.        I discussed the question of the name ‘sycamore’ with Alex George, WA’s premier botanical scholar.  Alex advised: The ‘original’ sycamore is Ficus sycomorus, literally the ‘fig mulberry’ from the Near East. The word comes from Hebrew shiqmāh, a fig tree, thence to Greek sȳkómoros, then Late Latin sȳcomorus, and Middle English sycomore. There is no classical Latin word for it. I don’t know when the spelling with an ‘a’ came in; spelling with an ‘o’ is still used in some cases.  Nowadays, ‘sycamore’ is the name of several tree species, depending on which country you are in.

6.      These two photographs are taken from Wayside and Woodland Trees – a pocket guide to the British Sylva by Edward Step. This delightful little book (mine is the 1904 edition) was bequeathed to me by the botanist S. J. Herriot.