The “Sycamore Gap” tree exhibition opens to mark one year after its felling | England

“I had this in my workshop for about a week and one day I walked in and one of the people I work with just hugged it,” said artist Charlie Whinney as he spoke in front of a nearly six-foot section of the tree tribe.

It’s a lump of wood, but it’s not a lump of wood. It is the largest remaining portion of the felled Sycamore Gap tree and has been put on public display in Northumberland as if it were rightly an Old Masters painting.

However, unlike an old master, visitors are allowed to touch it, and there is a real thrill and energy in being able to do so.

“I’ve been working with wood and trees for many years and, to be honest, I’m usually pretty unsentimental,” Whinney said. “A tree is a tree. But this project changed the way I look at things… That tree meant so much to so many people.”

Whinney has created an exhibit that opens a year after the Sycamore Gap tree was illegally cut down.

You can also see photos that people sent in and that they took while the tree was still alive. But it’s not the tree that stands out, said Tony Gates, the chief executive of Northumberland National Park.

“What strikes me is the expression on people’s faces. It’s just the pure, unbridled joy of people in a place that makes them feel good.”

The Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall, which was probably 120 years old, was one of the most revered trees of all and became known as the Robin Hood tree after it was featured in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

After the fall, administrators asked the public to come up with ideas for a memorial service.

There were more than 2,000 responses, some wilder than others. “There have been people who have suggested physically lifting the tree back onto the stump,” said Andrew Poad, the National Trust’s general manager for its Hadrian’s Wall properties.

“That we sew it back together in the hope that it will grow back. People offered to pay for it. It may have been done somewhere else, but with the wind blowing here it wouldn’t have stayed up long.”

Most of the suggestions were good and came from the heart. “There is a thesis that needs to be written about the powerful connection a tree can have with people,” Poad said.

It was decided that there was no need for a memorial at the site itself as shoots were growing from the stump over the summer.

Eight were initially spotted. Today there are about 25. What happens then is in nature. Nobody knows whether a dominant offspring will become anything like what was there before.

“We have absolutely no idea,” Gates said. “It’s too early to call. Let’s see what the tree gives us. Let’s enjoy the fact that it’s still there.”

The exhibition coincides with the announcement that 49 Sycamore Gap tree saplings will be made available to communities across the UK.

For the next four weeks, members of the public can nominate a location they think deserves one of what the National Trust calls Trees of Hope.

The trust on Friday gave two locations as examples of places that would receive a seedling, hoping it would inspire applicants.

One of these is Tina’s Haven in County Durham, a planned community nature reserve that is part of a program to help women recover from addiction and trauma. The other will be known as the Fergus Tree in a park in Blackwell, near Bristol, and will commemorate a boy who died of bone cancer aged 12.

The Sycamore Gap art exhibition is being held at the Sill Visitor Center near Hadrian’s Wall, where 240 children from 13 local schools took part in a celebration of the tree’s life on Friday before it opens to the public on Saturday.

In addition to viewing the tribe, visitors are encouraged to make their own “promises to nature,” which will become part of a second phase of the exhibition. “It’s a way of looking forward,” Whinney said. “This is not a shrine.”

Two men charged with criminal damage over the felling of the tree must stand trial at a crown court. They have denied the allegations.