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The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

economist.com

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Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#61

Post by RoyalHenOil »

jihadjihad wrote: post #42

> Unlike other members of the genus Acer, it did not put on a blazing autumn display. Its big five-lobed leaves, with their irregular notching, merely turned a crumpled brown. No one minded. As someone who lives next to a neighbor with an enormous old sycamore--I mind! :P The leaves are gigantic and they fall late into Nov, so my entire property gets blanketed with sheets of brown cardstock! Alas it is worth the effo…

Lucky! I bet you have fantastic soil.

I recommend chopping them up with a mower (but don't bag them; leave them in place). The shredded leaves make a really great mulching layer just before winter, when grasses and other plants need that extra insulation, and then they break down and nourish the soil in spring when everything starts actively growing again.

Do this process year after year, and you will have an absolutely gorgeous garden before long. It's a really good reason to plant deciduous trees (especially those that shed a lot of leaves that are too heavy to blow away). But they take such a long time to grow; you are super lucky to have a mature one over your garden already!

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#62

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

It makes me feel some solace that this tree was just a tree. We, humans, gave it significance. But that significance was imaginary. It was just a sycamore. It was only special because we told ourselves stories, and decided it was much more than a sycamore.

Strangely, even though the tree isn't actually dead, we pretend it is, because it won't look like it did when we assigned it significance. So really, nothing of value was lost. All that's happened is our own vanity and need for meaning was injured. And we'd never realize that unless it was felled.

We aren't commemorating a tree. We're commemorating our own need to find meaning in the world.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#63

Post by willis936 »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #50
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing: for the lulz, because wind-up merchants don't just live online.

Jargon question: what is “the lulz”?

Here is more than anyone should ever know about the lulz.

https://encyclopediadramatica.online/Lulz

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#64

Post by noobermin »

crtified wrote: post #14

I wish the tree had not been felled. A very sad and poignant act. Also, as I pointed out in another conversation here, and in the name of reciprocal repetition will do so again here, it is quite easy to find reports of equally heartbroken locals, the world over, lamenting the deliberate felling of any number of special, beloved, prominent trees, in the name of the routine building of a new road or factory or housing…

Simple, the developers, planners, or other stakeholders do NOT care about the trees in your neighborhood they only care about theirs.

Try cutting down your mayor's favorite tree in his yard. See how he feels about that.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#65

Post by et-al »

atum47 wrote: post #49
a-dub wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people have been doing shitty things for a very long time. people have been talking about how "things are worse nowadays" also for a very long time. not much to do now other than try to science it back into existence, replace it with a similar one, plant a new one and wait or declare it done and move on.

I mean, stupid shit finds a much larger audience pretty quick now a days. Harassing a police officers horse, bother the royal guard, eat the tidepod, planch in a dangerous place, those stupid YouTube pranks... Those are the mild ones, i saw a video of two teenagers who hit a police retired officer who was riding his bike. The whole thing was filmed. People have been evil from the beginning I give you that, but it see…

Just to be clear: those two teenagers intentionally killed someone on a bike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itIFlQaIAIQ

https://apnews.com/article/bicyclist-killed-teens-vegas-murd...

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#66

Post by Nursie »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #43
ionwake wrote: post #28

I once decided it would be a cool idea to walk in straight line across England and began wondering how I would plan it. For some reason I noticed and realised my half way mark was a few meters away from this tree. As in if you look at a map the tree sits in the center of England where its diameter is at its narrowest - check it out. An odd thing. Looking at the topography from google maps and I remember thinking what…

> sits in the center of England where its diameter is at its narrowest Seems like a good place to put a wall to split the land in two then. I wasn't aware until just now that the modern border of scotland is a good bit north of where Hadrian's wall is.

But South of the Antonine Wall.

Hadrian's gets all the recognition, and that's probably mostly because it is still recognisable, but the Romans built a second wall 20 years later, just to the north of where Glasgow and Edinburgh are now - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Wall

It was built mostly of turf and wood, so time has erased it much more completely, and apparently they retreated back to Hadrian's wall after only a few years.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#67

Post by jmyeet »

Humans are weird.

It's wild to me how sentimental people can get about a tree or incensed by, say, someone kicking a dog (neither of which are good, for the record) yet be completely indifferent to completely preventable human suffering. Worse, that suffering is often painted as a moral failure by those who are suffering, almost like they deserve it. They can even cheer it on.

I will never not find that bizarre. And sad.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#68

Post by huytersd »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
gambiting wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been there? The land in that area is rock with about an inch of soil on it, like most moorland - it would not support a forest, it never did(within the last couple thousand years anyway) . Romans didn't build the hadrians wall through a forest after all, the area was already barren then. And no one is directing me to feel angry - the tree did hold a special place in my heart, I've been to it with my dad…

I have never been there and it makes me pretty angry as well. The coward(s) that did this probably never suspected the kind of blowback this would create, if they're ever identified they'll have a hard time moving around the UK without meeting people that would like to have a word with them.

If he’s guilty, won’t he be identified? It’s public record then right?

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#69

Post by Nursie »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #10

In my community: I love the cutsie pootsie Victorians everywhere, the time-capsule 1910s look. Some people want to make it easier to demolish this stuff and build whatever house you want - the rule is you have to keep the facade or whatever - and I sympathize with that. But nobody gives a fuck about the brutalist structures being torn down, like the VA in Chicago or the Federal Building in Boston, because they're ugl…

People have to live in and around those places. Concrete monstrosities make that less pleasant. Brutalist architecture (for the most part, I know there are a few exceptions but they are exceptions) feels impersonal, oppressive, monolithic. It also for the most part feels and looks drab, as the materials dull and stain, and make everything a sad grey-beige. It's the stuff of dystopia. It's the human spirit being relentlessly ground under the weight of impersonal mediocrity.

The whole ethos of 'form follows function' is oxymoronic - making people feel good, making spaces warm, welcoming, decorative, these are all part of 'function'.

So yes, lets tear down the brutalist crap. However well-meaning its proponents were, it's been a failure and it's time to move on.

Re: The Sycamore Gap tree held a particularly deep place in people's hearts

#70

Post by antisthenes »

jmyeet wrote: post #67

Humans are weird. It's wild to me how sentimental people can get about a tree or incensed by, say, someone kicking a dog (neither of which are good, for the record) yet be completely indifferent to completely preventable human suffering. Worse, that suffering is often painted as a moral failure by those who are suffering, almost like they deserve it. They can even cheer it on. I will never not find that bizarre. And…

> yet be completely indifferent to completely preventable human suffering.

A lot of human suffering is self-inflicted. There's also the point that humans have a higher bar for being able to take care of themselves.

A human can and should defend themselves. A tree or a dog cannot. (and before someone decides to ackshually correct me, we've been breeding dogs for docility for over 10,000 years)

> I will never not find that bizarre.

You find bizarre that people have different value systems? Huh?

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