notable-trees
@notable-trees

An ash tree grown in, on, and among the gravestones piled around its base at St. Pancras Old Church, in London.

In the 1860s, a rail expansion saw hundreds of graves exhumed at the St. Pancras cemetery. The markers were not moved with the bones. Instead, an employee of the architecture firm on the expansion– Thomas Hardy, who would go on to achieve fame as an author later in life– stacked them around the base of the then-sapling. The tree, out of the way of the rail-line, continued to grow. Part-memorial, part-storage.

The Hardy Tree, weakened by the stones and a particularly bad winter storm, fell in December 2022.

Its obituary.


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