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It is partly a matter of composition: the way the ground slopes down from Hadrian’s Wall to frame the sycamore against the sky: a part of the landscape but solitary amid the bare hills. It was partly the terrible precision of the chainsaw cut that this week slashed through three hundred years of the sycamore’s growth. Whatever the cause, the anguished outcry that has followed its destruction seems to me to declare our love for what trees embody. According to research by Derby University, half of us have a favourite tree and more people said they feel very close to their trees than feel close to their neighbours. I’m a convert to this way of thinking. When I first moved into my house I resented the large ash tree behind the garden because it casts shade and depletes the soil. Now I feel a connection of the sort I usually reserve for human beings and pets. That sense of kinship has ancient, animistic roots in the traditional belief that trees are alive in their own right or through the tree spirits that inhabit them. Whether they’re truly alive depends, for me, not on biology but on whether we feel that the natural world as a whole is an inert, lifeless mass that we can exploit as ‘resources’ or we see it more as our ancestors did. A sense that the world is alive is important for Buddhism, which has at its core stories of the Buddha living in the forest, surrounded by animals and supernatural beings. It’s captured in the image of the Buddha seated cross-legged at the time of his Enlightenment before a huge Bodhi Tree, or Tree of Awakening. If the Buddha’s attainment represents the culmination of a path of mental and spiritual development, the image presents this is part of a larger, natural process. Buddhist ethics also grow from a feeling of empathy with all life; and, from its side, nature protects us, as the overhanging branches of the Bodhi Tree shelter the Buddha. The response to the sycamore’s loss suggests to me that it represents more than an act of isolated destruction. It stands for the loss of biodiversity and natural environments that have accompanied our increasing estrangement from nature. The gap where the perfectly proportioned sycamore stood for so long feels to me like a rebuke, a challenge and, perhaps even a call to action.