In September 2023, in the middle of the night, England’s most beloved tree was mysteriously felled in a bizarre act of vandalism. The public outcry was swift and furious—this was, after all, by some reports, the most photographed tree in the country, the so-called Sycamore Gap Tree. “The senseless destruction of what is undoubtedly a world-renowned landmark—and a local treasure,” was how one law enforcement official described it in the pages of the New York Times, before the culprits had even been apprehended.

Two men were eventually arrested for the crime; for our January issue, the writer Rosa Lyster attended their trial last spring. Her account of the proceedings is also an attempt to understand the nature of the tree’s power and its apparent hold on the country. Like all criminal trial narratives, it also aims to understand what could have motivated the criminals to do what they did—and whether such a thing can ever really be understood.

Will Stephenson: Were you familiar with the Sycamore Gap Tree before it was cut down? When we first discussed the piece, the intensity of the public response seemed to have taken you by surprise or to have verged on the absurd (the phrase “English lachrymose nonsense” might have contributed to this). What made you decide to investigate further?

Rosa Lyster: I’d never heard of the tree before it got cut down and half the country went berserk. People are still pretty worked up about it. Just this week, there was a story in The Sun with the headline SYCAMORONS: Viewers stunned after Sycamore Gap tree documentary is interrupted by sponsored ad of Ford car pulling felled tree.

I initially dismissed the public outrage as an expression of a specifically English kind of sentimental meltdown in which everyone competes to see who can cry the most about Paddington Bear or Peter Pan. It seemed bonkers to be carrying on about it when there were so many hideous and objectively more important things happening in the world. Soon, though, I realized that I had no right to be so lofty and cynical when I myself could not stop thinking about this tree and the two guys who were accused of cutting it down. The crime they were charged with—mere “criminal damage”—didn’t at all accord with the scale of the public outrage. Trees are illegally felled every day, obviously, and nothing happens—but in this case, there was some speculation about the handing down of a significant prison sentence right from the beginning. I suppose I wanted to attend the trial to try and work out what it was about the felling of this tree that had made people so angry and upset.

Stephenson: It’s an unusual piece of trial reportage, in that it’s about a tree. Had you ever reported on a trial before? Were you thinking of any other examples from this genre? Or was other tree-related literature more relevant at the end of the day?

Lyster: This was my first trial. Most great trial reporting tends to be about serious and/or seriously violent crimes, cases wherein the harm done can be easily identified and named, it’s obvious who the victims are, and a courtroom seems like a basically appropriate venue for what’s going on. None of that was true of the Sycamore Gap trial. Ultimately, it was not trial literature but literature having to do with trees that helped me think through the mysteries of this case. In particular: the botanist Oliver Rackham’s work, John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce, Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World, Augustine’s Confessions (not strictly about trees, but close), the book of Genesis (ditto), and Grimms’ fairy tales. I had Don Paterson’s poem “Two Trees” pinned above my desk.

The single piece of writing I found most useful while working on this piece, though, was John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Mother Nut, which has a tree-chopping incident at its heart. In that novella, the felling of a tree is a symbolic act, a key to understanding the protagonist’s patterns of thought. But it’s not just a symbolic act. It’s also the keeling over of this massive living thing in the middle of a forest, with a weight and a gravity that has nothing to do with how people feel about it. I must have read it fifteen times, trying to work out how he did it.

Stephenson: Did you interact with the other journalists in court? Did they seem to find the proceedings as bizarre as you? What was the range of perspectives?

Lyster: I was lucky to befriend another reporter who was working on a longer piece, and who was likewise taken aback by the strangeness of what we were listening to each day. We were not always capable of keeping our faces totally straight. There was this sort of awful moment during the prosecution’s cross-examination of the defendant Adam Carruthers when I got seized by a completely annihilating fit of silent laughter, to the extent that the chief inspector on the case came up to me at the end of the day to congratulate me on not breaking down altogether (this sounds made up, but there are multiple witnesses who will confirm it). At times like that, it was good to know I wasn’t alone in finding the whole thing pretty irregular.

I could be wrong about this, but it seemed as though the reporters working to a hard daily deadline were less arrested by the trial’s weirder aspects. Their priorities were different. I cannot overemphasize how profound the public interest was in this case, and the daily news reporters were much more focused on relaying what was happening every day. They didn’t seem to care as much about owls and the string.

Stephenson: You highlighted a number of side characters with investments in the tree: a tree lawyer, the director of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, an archaeologist named Jim Crow, and so on. Did you leave anyone out? Was there anything that one of these people said that particularly surprised you?

Lyster: I dream of doing an extravagantly footnoted version of the story in which I can include all the people I did not manage to find room for. I interviewed a forensic botanist named Mark Spencer, whose evidence formed a small part of the prosecution’s case. Forensic botany is a very niche kind of crime-scene science. Most of what Spencer had to say had nothing to do with the trial—the majority of his casework involves murders and violent crime—but was so breathtakingly interesting that I spent hours trying to work it into the piece somehow. By looking at the vegetation around a body in a shallow grave, say, Spencer can help police work out whether there was a struggle, how long the body has been lying there, whether it’s been moved. Most people, he says, look at plants and just see “green blobs” whereas he sees a narrative: structure, time, and form.

There was also a woman who made Sycamore Gap–themed jewelry, and a man who described the sycamore as “just one more tree awaiting justice.” There was an older couple I interviewed in a pub near Sycamore Gap. We were sitting in a corner, underneath a big Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves poster, and their voices went all whispery as they told me that they could not understand what all the fuss was about, that they had been hiking in the area all their lives and had never even noticedthe tree. The woman sort of leaned away from the poster as she said it, as if to shield Robin Hood from the confession.

Stephenson: Having written the piece, do you feel any closer to the outrage (or the “victim” whose impact statement was read at the sentencing) than you did at the start of this process?

Lyster: Yes. In the course of reporting this piece, I made quite a few trips to the spot where the tree had stood. It’s in a beautiful, isolated part of the country, and archaeologists will tell you that the landscape doesn’t look all that different now than it would have when Hadrian’s Wall was built: there are lots of small farms, hardly any trees. The more time I spent there, the more I could see how excellent the tree must have looked in that spot.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the process of reporting this piece reminded me of something I have always known, which is that there is basically nothing better than a tree. Carl Sagan said that trees are our cousins—I don’t understand exactly what he was driving at in scientific terms, but I know he was right. We are lucky to share the world with them.