The Tolpuddle Tree

The Tolpuddle Tree

The tallest, broadest sycamore in Dorset
Is a stately tree –
Beloved by Lords and Parliament,
A pillar of society –
He’s tended by The National Trust,
As English as can be,
In a village with a funny name,
And a bloody history.

Yet sycamores are not a native,
Bringing European fruits
To challenge all the local trees
With non-conforming shoots.
These upstarts will not know their place,
Their seeds are new recruits,
And down into the bedrock
They have planted creeping roots.

Yet, for all their canopy may shield,
And union hold fast,
They do not live so long, these trees,
Their shelter cannot last.
And though the status quo may praise,
When safely in the past,
They’ll gladly chop his children down
And root him out at last.

‘Sycamore‘ is a restless word.  It appears to have started life in Hebrew, before the Greeks noticed how much it coincidentally sounded like their words for fig-mulberry.  From there it made its way via Latin and French to English, where it was applied to a newly-introduced species of European maple tree.  Confusingly, the contemporeous authors of the King James Bible used it several times to refer to the original fig tree.  And then the Americans took the word and slapped it on a type of plane tree quite unrelated to either (although in their partial defence, the leaves of the plane do look a very maple-like, as even Carl Linneus noted in his name Acer pseudoplatanus).  The one thing the three trees seem to have in common is their shade-giving spread.

Meanwhile, it is also a surname – apparently deriving from the village of Siglemere near Bramford in Suffolk, from *sīcel ‘small stream’ + mere ‘pool’.  So in seems that my eight-year old self was quite wrong to insist that they were called sycamores because their seed-cases were shaped like sickles…