The acer up our sleeves
IF the Sycamore Gap tree, on the Northumbrian stretch of Hadrian’s Wall, seems to carry a self-satisfied air, it’s with good reason. The picture-perfect nature of the site gained it an international profile when it served as a backdrop in the Hollywood smash-hit feature film of 1991, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. More recently, it won the Woodland Trust’s English Tree of the Year award (2016), came fifth in a European equivalent competition and was back in front of the cameras in the ITV detective drama series Vera.
Sycamores, on the whole, don’t win prizes —at least not in this country. Last year, one planted on a tower of Colchester Castle, Essex, to mark Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, tried to
