The headlines had canvassed the coming storm as ‘once in a generation’ – I doubted that. Thursday night in the pub, the red weather warning buzzing on our phones almost jolted us off our chairs. Uneasily we laughed it off and continued chatting. That Friday at 6am I woke up and heard her arrive – Éowyn – clattering and rattling around the tenement, and gathering force. I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I felt excited, like a child given a snow day off. I was nervous too, because no one knew exactly how bad this would get. Too curious to stay at home I ventured out to watch the sea, wearing a bicycle helmet just in case. The beach was ominously quiet. I hoped everyone was staying safe. Later I read the headlines:

Storm Éowyn leaves a trail of destruction – In the Edinburgh Garden, 15 trees have been lost – either uprooted by the wind or damaged beyond recovery. This includes the Garden’s tallest specimen, the majestic 29-metre Cedrus deodara, planted in 1859 (…) A further 27 trees have been heavily damaged, and more than 100 panes of glass have been lost from our glasshouses.
– Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh website, 25 January 2025.

Éowyn had pounded through the Royal Botanical Gardens at 80mph. Incredibly, the upper half of the lone Himalayan Cedar at the pond had toppled down, crashing into a fence below. When I visited a few days after, on a calm and bright afternoon, the area was taped off like a crime scene. The tree still stood tall, though half her size, with bulky branches scattered on the path, dismembered. The beheaded top was exposed like a splintered bone, the cracked-open heartwood piercing the sky. I didn’t know a storm could do such violence. It felt like a foreboding of some kind. “Will she make it?” I asked a caretaker who stood by like a security guard, arms crossed. He briskly shook his head: “The remaining branches can no longer support the tree, I’m afraid, it won’t recover from this. We’ll need to decide what to do with it.” His tone was flat but I noticed a tremble in his lip.

How do we mourn a dying tree?

Imagine: immediately after the tree toppled, people gather to hold a wake. We sit around the terminal tree, mostly in silence, looking up from our camping chairs, while others tend her wound. As time passes, some of us take naps in our sleeping bags, others pass around mugs of tea. Mourners come and go, taking turns. There is soft singing, and music. Someone takes out the Botanical Garden’s aeolian harp from its pavilion, made from a mighty Wych Elm tree felled by disease many years ago. Its delicate notes join the sound of the wind shuddering the tree’s remaining branches. One morning – some months later – a tree doctor in formal attire arrives and scratches one of the branches with a pocket knife. No green, no sap. She announces the tree has, finally, died. The bells of Edinburgh’s cathedrals ring all night.

What do we do when a great tree topples?

One evening, a week after her death, the Gardens call a funeral. Everyone with a connection to the tree is invited. There are hundreds of us, from all around the city and beyond. We line up around the pond and as we walk past her dead stump, we give our condolences to the Garden care-takers. To the sound of a gong, we slowly walk 166 steps in spiralling circles around the tree, anti-clockwise, as if tracing its rings. We imagine ourselves back in time, each step a year, all the way to 1859, when this Cedrus was planted here in the soil.

Then we put chairs in widening circles around the tree and sit down in the red light of the sunset. The Regius Keeper of the Garden steps forward to share a eulogy:

“Cedrus Deodara is one of four resplendent Cedar species in the world and is found from Afghanistan to North-western India.”

Then, addressing the stump with a slightly broken voice, he adds: “You were the absolute finest of our Living Collection. Mind you, your native siblings in the Himalayan Mountains can grow to 600 years old and 75 meters high. You died long before your time.”

He pauses solemnly.

“You were far away from home, brought as a seed across the ocean and cultivated here, in our magnificent Gardens. Destined for a grand life, it was Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Prince Albert, who planted you. It was 1859 – the same year the Big Ben, Westminster’s Great Clock, started ticking.”

What have you seen in your time?

After the eulogy, we listen to the surrounding trees speaking silently of their neighbour, each of their lives entangled at the roots. We wait for the squirrels to pay a visit, the magpies and the wood pigeons, and a twittering splatter of tits bending down the tree’s whimsical bows.

From the silence, people share memories of laying in the grass looking up at the tree’s drooping, swaying branches, feeling small and content in the dappled light. As the night darkens, we come forward, one by one. Some of us put our hands on the tree, some of us rest our foreheads on the cold bark for a while. The aeolian harp plays. It takes a long time for each of us to say goodbye. It is fully dark when we go inside, where plain sandwiches are waiting on white fold-out tables.

What hasn’t yet been spoken?

Eulogies erase as much as they reveal. After your death, I learn more and more about your story: Your Sanskrit name means “tree of the Gods”, from deva (divine) and dāru (tree). On the slopes of the Himalayas, you grow in dense, sacred groves. If you are cut for avarice, legend has it, the act brings misfortune upon the one who did the felling – though your fragrant wood is used, reverently, for temples, shrines or medicine. When the British came, it was your lot, the mighty deodar trees, that they cut down to construct barracks, bridges, public buildings and railway cars. Victorian plant hunters brought back hundreds of kilos of your seeds across the sea. Those with wealth planted you on the lawns of their large country houses to impress visitors. With your pyramid-like silhouette, you were a marker, a flagpole of the Empire. And here you stood in the Botanical Gardens, both singular and iconic, and loved. A living statue you were: the passing of time, of sun and wind, slowly turned solid as you grew wider and taller towards the sky. Until, along with many colonial statues over the past few years, you suddenly toppled over.

Were you no longer of this time?

Imagine: your story gets another chapter. Some weeks after the funeral, your stump is uprooted with great force, and a group of traditional boat builders is commissioned to turn your wood into a slender ark to sail across to India. On board is a basket filled with your egg-shaped cones, a return gift to Saharanpur Botanic garden, where many of your seeds were taken from in the days of the empire. It receives a mixed response, and seeds questions.

A year later, on the date of the storm – the 24th of January 2026 – a wrapped-up group of us returns to the Botanics to plant a Caucasian oak, Quercus macranthera, where you once stood. The small seedling shivers in the winter wind. Arborists say that the climate of the Caucasus will soon be similar to ours. To the sound of 300 gong rings, we spiral clockwise around the oakling, each slow step a year into a future we can barely imagine.

How do we grow roots to weather the storms?

The Royal Botanical Gardens Edinburgh ran a successful crowdfunder after Éowyn to cover the storm damage. There hasn’t been a public announcement about what they plan to do with the toppled Cedrus Deodara.