That is a lovely tree. It’s been posing in a scenic location near Hadrian’s Wall for 150 years.
Then a pair of idiots came along with a chainsaw and did this to it:
The two vandals have been found guilty. They did it for a “laugh” and to fetch a souvenir for one of the men’s newborn daughter — I don’t think she’ll be taking pride in that as she grows up fatherless.
In a bit of good news, saplings have sprung up from the stump and a new tree may arise.
It’s not so easy to kill a hardwood tree. Let’s hope our democracy is more like a sycamore than a pine.
so one of em’s defense was ‘it were him!’ and the other’s was ‘it weren’t me, i got a baby at home!’?
Remember all those Johnson and Johnson commercials? “Having a baby changes everything”?
In this case: Having a baby makes you a dipshidiot. Congrats, morons. 🙄
As Marvin the Martian used to say, “This makes me very, very angry.”
This Marvin quote is even more spot on, “I think man is the most interesting insect on Earth. Don’t you? There is a growing tendency to think of man as a rational thinking being, which is absurd.”
The ancient Polynesians had a practice where they would sacrifice 4 people when building a new temple by placing them, alive, into holes dug at the 4 corners of the new building and then dropping a pole into each hole that would serve to hold up the roof. The thinking was that the temple would then have a strong foundation holding it up.
I suggest this practice might be a fitting penalty for these two ensuring that the roots of a new tree placed into a deep hole dug near the old tree and them placed into the hole before filling it with dirt would provide the nutrients needed to make the tree strong for another 150 years.
Jeez is this not humanity’s history in a nutshell? There’s something beautiful and widely admired, then along comes an idiot and destroys it for laffs.
In this case the tree may resprout but even so it will be a lifetime before it returns as it was.
In most other cases well, not much to be done is it. A plague to be borne.
Larry @ 5. I think that it’s either in Graves’ The White Goddess (flaky but entertaining) or Frazer’s The Golden Bough that the ancient Britons would punish the ring-barking of a tree in a sacred grove by doing the same to the perpetrators of the sacrilege and wrapping the skin round the tree. I also recall that ancient Europeans also sacrificed people by burying them in the foundations of new buildings although this was refined medieval times to simply burying the shadow of a person who would then waste away.
They’re quite a couple:
It does sound like the crime was motivated by more than “having a laugh” though:
Within a few short months of the “Great Emigration” on the Oregon trail, some yahoos cut down the Lone Pine, an enormous pine tree (> 100 feet tall) that had stood as a guide for indigenous peoples for centuries.
This has happened before, many times.
There was a sacred Golden Spruce on Haida Gwaii islands (formerly the Queen Charlotte islands in British Columbia) called the Golden Spruce.
The Golden Spruce, sacred to the Haida people, was cut down not so long ago by some weird guy for obscure reasons.
What cutting down an ancient tree has to do with the logging industry is unknown to normal people.
It wasn’t Hadwin’s best idea but he was at least consistent.
He apparently committed suicide by Kayak.
He gets points for style here.
“Tree stump sprouting is a natural way that fallen trees regenerate. The sprouts that grow from the roots will probably become a full tree, but the sprouts that sprout up directly from the stump will be like a tree branch and may not develop a strong enough foundation to become a large tree.”
via Copilot
hillaryrettig1 @ 9
That is why the US Forest Service does not disclose the location of Methuselah, thought to be the oldest tree in the world at over 4800 years old. A bristlecone pine tree, it’s located in the White Mtns in eastern CA.
It’s called coppicing and is sometimes a forest management tool. Not in this case however.
Whether or not the subsequent tree(s) are as strong as the original will depend on how high the stump is and how close to the ground the saplings are. If the regrowth is closer to the ground, new roots may spring directly from the sapling(s) into the ground as the tree(s) grow. That’s years in the future though. If the stump is fairly tall and the saplings are developing higher up, the future isn’t good for the new growth–the stump is essentially an open wound and a source of infection/infestation for the tree, at least until the stump seals/grows over. If the stump rots out before the saplings grow roots of their own, it’s toast in the first moderately large storm.
The silver lining for the daughter is that she will largely grow up without her useless asshat father–yes, you read that right. Not every parent is a good parent and for all the (extremely) public breastbeating about fatherless children and fathers who abandon their children, not nearly enough is said about the damage that asshole fathers do to their kids.
Just because he fathered this kid (“took him minutes, took her nowhere”–thanks, Bowie!) doesn’t mean that he has or ever had her best interests at heart. The UK social safety net is pretty good (or at least way better than the US one, which is largely nonexistent now–thanks, Republicans!) so at least her basic needs can be met without the economic necessity of having this toxic asshole in her life. If bio dad is like this now, when she’s an infant, imagine the toxic crap this kid will endure with him in her life. Now at least she has the chance of growing up without his toxic BS in her life and with the possibility (if not the probability) that her mom will make better mating and dating choices in the future. I mean, Jesus, lady, what made you pick this asshole out of the herd? There’s over 8 billion humans on the planet, was this really the best you could do? Make better choices in the future.
Larry @9
The location of many superlative trees — oldest, tallest, thickest — are often kept secret. It’s too bad the same wasn’t done with irreplaceable cultural and geological sites. Those suffer from damage from visitors to parks far too often.