A 16-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage in connection with the felling of the 300-year-old Sycamore Gap tree in the north of England.
Officers arrested the teenager amid an outpouring of sadness over the destruction of the landmark, which has been a feature of the site at Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland for hundreds of years. The boy is in custody and assisting officers with their inquiries, Northumbria police said on Thursday.
Locals and national park authorities said they were “struggling to see the logic” in the destruction of a sycamore which had long become “part of this area’s DNA” and had gone through thousands of changes of seasons.
The tree, believed to have been about 300 years old, was made famous when it appeared in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner.
If they had found it right after it had been felled, they might have had a slight chance if they already had a crane nearby and ready and a firehouse.
Trees are basically a huge ring of tubes to carry water/sap/ tree blood, a thin layer of living wood between the bark and the dead wood inside from earlier growth. The tree relies on those tubes always being full of water because it doesn’t have any way to push the sap around actively. The water evaporates from the leaves, buds, any part of the tree not covered by bark, and this pulls water from the bottom of the tree up to replace it. (Technically the water moves up due to capillary action of the close molecular interactions of the H2O and the tiny size of the tubes so it doesn’t need a lot of “pull”)
But if these tubes get cut, an air bubble gets in and that flow is interrupted. It’s difficult or impossible for a plant to recover flow in that tube. If the cut is kept wet, it can keep air from blocking the tube, which is wide you are advised to trim flower stems under running water and never let them dry out if you are keeping flowers in a vase.
If a tree loses most of all of these tubes to air bubbles, it can’t really recover. This is why “ringing” a tree kills it and also why there is a strict limit on the number of times you can tap a Maple Tree for syrup.
Not OP, but thanks for taking the time to thoroughly answer a question I had as well.
Awesome answer, thanks!