The toppling of a tree, without injury, in a city churchyard would not normally make news headlines, but the mighty ash outside London’s Old St Pancras church was one of the capital’s most venerated natural landmarks and a destination of literary pilgrimage. Encircled with gravestones that it seemed to be absorbing into its root system, the Hardy Tree acquired its name, and its celebrity, from a story that the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, then a young architect’s apprentice in a rapidly growing London, was personally responsible for stacking its trunk with stones cleared to make way for the expansion of the Midland railway line in the mid-1860s.
By Hardy’s time, the literary pedigree of Old St Pancras churchyard was well-established. It was the original resting place of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter Mary Shelley was said to have gone there for secret trysts with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Hardy himself wrote of overseeing the exhumations. He was charged with turning up at unexpected times to ensure that the clerk of works was doing a respectful job and not simply dumping the bones, as had happened in previous cemetery clearances.
What is missing is any evidence that Hardy had any direct involvement in the arrangement of the stones. Moreover, photographs of the churchyard, unearthed by an assiduous amateur historian, suggest that the current ash grew between 1926 and 1960, only later becoming known as the Hardy Tree. That it had no greater verifiable connection with the Victorian author than, say, Sherwood Forest’s Major Oak had with Robin Hood, or Berkshire’s Ankerwycke Yew had with the signing of the Magna Carta, hardly matters. By mere dint of their longevity, trees collect myths and become lightning rods for the historical imagination.
The Ankerwycke Yew is the National Trust’s oldest tree, believed to be up to 2,500 years old, and is also said to have witnessed Henry VIII’s courtship of Anne Boleyn. The enduring fascination with Tudor history has ensured its protagonists more than their share of legendary trees, from Queen Mary’s Thorn in St Andrews to the Queen Elizabeth Oak, which has been holding court on its side in Greenwich Park since falling over in 1991.
Oaks and yews live for thousands of years; ashes survive for a few hundred if lucky. They are the opportunists of the arboreal world which, until the recent catastrophic arrival of ash dieback, have pushed their way up in the most unlikely of places, providing 5% of the UK’s tree cover. This is what the Hardy ash appears to have done before it succumbed to a common fungal infection.
The demise of an old tree is always sad. But perhaps the real story of the Hardy ash is that it wasn’t special; it didn’t witness the canoodlings of the Shelleys, fall in a freak storm or die in a scary, imported pandemic. The entanglement of root and stone reveals a history of nature and humanity competing and coexisting in a swiftly changing industrial landscape. In death, it has grown into its own urban myth.
