An ash surrounded by gravestones in an ancient churchyard reveals humanity’s urge to tell its own stories through trees
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.
