Rosa Lister
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Rosa Lister’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It was too weird a detail to be helpful in a courtroom, but it was also too weird to ignore, because it didn't seem like something that a person would just invent.
If he'd simply wanted to account for how he had learned of the tree's existence, Graham could have said almost anything, instead of this otherworldly business about a piece of string that contains within it the essence of a beloved tree, like something out of The Brothers Grimm.
In fact, the whole thing seemed like a fairy tale that had made its way into a courtroom.
It often felt as if the most important question in the courtroom was not whether Carruthers and Graham had done it, but whether they, or anyone, understood what it was that they had done.
There was a kind of collective effort to affirm that something terrible had happened, something much worse than ordinary criminal damage, much worse than simply cutting down a tree.
How else to account for the ferocity of the public indignation?
At one point, Carruthers said that he hadn't been able to understand what all the fuss was about.
My understanding, he said, was that it was just a tree.
The truth is that people in Britain don't really like sycamores.
Gardeners go so far as to despise them.
They are among the only trees in the country that are regularly referred to as weeds.
They are prolific self-seeders.
One mature tree can be the parent of thousands of seedlings in a single year.
They can grow almost anywhere, and they do.
They are non-native, which some people have strong feelings about.
Vesicamor's tendency to flourish in places where plenty of other trees would wither and die might have been the reason that John Clayton, a 19th century landowner, planted one in a gap along Hadrian's Wall.
The wall, whose construction began in the year 122, was built to mark the northwestern boundary of the Roman Empire, serving as a frontier, customs post, and reminder of the reach of power.
Clayton planted the sycamore presumably because he thought it would look nice there.
An isolated tree right in the middle of a dramatic dip in the landscape.
The wall running steeply up each side of it, such that hikers could look down at it as they approached.
Showing 101–120 of 157 · page 6 of 8
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