After 150 years of life surrounded by gravestones, London’s Hardy Tree falls | CBC Radio

London, U.Okay., tour information Jack Chesher has walked many individuals via the historical past of the Hardy Tree. Named after the Victorian-era author Thomas Hardy, the lone ash tree is only a brief stroll from King’s Cross station, in St. Pancras Gardens, surrounded by gravestones. 

It has been celebrated as an emblem of life amid dying for over 150 years, however now the well-known tree has met its personal finish. The Hardy Tree toppled over this week, after being weakened by a current storm.

“My immediate reaction was sadness, really,” Chesher advised As It Happens visitor host Helen Mann. “It’s a beautiful thing to look at.” 

He described the roots of the tree, rising in between the gravestones, as a robust picture, regardless that he knew it was dying.

The Hardy Tree was contaminated with a fungus in 2014, and since then the an infection has been rotting the tree from the within. The native Camden Council, anticipating the tree’s dying, took steps to handle its remaining years.

“There’s a railing around the tree,” Chesher mentioned. “You used to be able to get up close to it, but [now] for a little while they had a railing all the way around the tree so that if it did fall, it wouldn’t fall onto someone.”

Chesher famous there have been plans to exchange the railing with a bigger and “a bit nicer looking” construction, however a sequence of storms this yr made the tree weaker. Then, in spite of everything these years, the tree lastly fell earlier this week.

“At about 2:30 p.m. on Boxing Day, some locals heard it crash to the ground,” he mentioned. 

The tour information visited St. Pancras Gardens on Wednesday and noticed a rose on one of many gravestones close to the tree.

“Lots of people have been going and paying their respects,” he mentioned. He additionally heard an impromptu studying of a Thomas Hardy poem.

The story of the Hardy Tree

Now, all that’s left of the Hardy Tree is its trunk in a yard behind St. Pancras Old Church. The church yard was as soon as used for burials — and was a lot greater than it’s now.

That was till the 1860s, when plans for a railway line reduce via the yard, and with the intention to construct the station, one thing needed to be finished concerning the roughly 10,000 our bodies buried there.

Thomas Hardy was an architect’s apprentice at the moment. Chesher mentioned that he had the “horrific” and “gruesome” job of exhuming these our bodies and transferring their gravestones.

“You’d have thought it would be an artist or a writer or someone with a vivid imagination that would put together this display of gravestones,” he mentioned. “I think … [it] is said to have affected him quite a lot actually.”

Chesher says that pile of completely stacked gravestones gathered across the ash tree reminds him of contrasts, equivalent to life and dying, the uplifting and the macabre, and the harmful and the attractive. And Chesher says you possibly can see these themes in Thomas Hardy’s writing. 

“Living through that Victorian period, sometimes called the age of destruction — because of the railways, because of the huge clearance schemes that were happening in London at the time — so much was having to be knocked down in the name of progress,” mentioned Chesher.

“The Hardy tree is very much a product of that period.”

The circle of life

Camden councillor Adam Harrison put out an announcement yesterday concerning the plans for the fallen tree.

“We were very sorry to see that the much-loved Hardy Tree has come down and we have already started the discussion with members of the local community about ways to commemorate the tree and its story,” the councillor mentioned.

The council is contemplating harvesting the wooden to create a commemorative object, equivalent to a bench, or planting a brand new tree. Chesher, then again, introduced up the thought of letting nature take its course. 

“I spoke to the rector actually, and he would just quite like it to stay there as it is … as it decomposes…. That would also be part of its story,” the tour information mentioned.