about the tree
Children from
the small island
backing
the big message
Two giants of the world of conservation and biodiversity, Sir David Attenborough and Professor E.O.Wilson, will meet at the Royal Geographical Society on Friday 22nd October for a once-in-a-lifetime conversation, as part of Half-Earth Day 2021.
Behind these two great men will appear a backdrop of an astonishing image of a tree carved in stone — a Wood’s Cycad, reaching up to 9 metres in height.
The live London audience will include young people from the Atlantic Academy on Portland, Dorset.
The Tree
This is a “Wood’s Cycad”, native to South Africa. It is the “Lonesome George” of the plant world – with only one tree left in the wild.
It speaks eloquently to the jeopardy of extinction – but in equal measure to the resilience of the natural world. There are more than 60 in botanical gardens around the world but they are all cuttings from the last wild tree and so are genetically identical.
Cycads thrived in the Jurassic period and Portland, on the Jurassic Coast, is an important international site for cycad fossils.
The Inscription
On the trunk of the tree will appear an inscription. It begins with the words of HRH Prince Philip, speaking about the project in 2014.
This is our
one speck of
the universe.
Prince Philip was Royal Patron of the project for the last ten years of his life.
The rest of the message was written in consultation with school groups on the island.
It is a call to action to the world’s leaders meeting at COP26 in November and the UN Biodiversity Summit in China in May next year.
The Masons’ Marks
Beneath the inscription will appear over 700 ‘mason’s mark’ signatures, designed by the children of the two schools on Portland, Atlantic Academy and St George’s Primary School. Individual mason's marks have been used for centuries by stonemasons as a way of ‘signing’ their work.
The pictures above show a rough draft of the image of the sculpture in situ in the mine, with the inscription on the left and a detail of some of the Portland children's mason's marks already created on the right. At Friday's event a full polished high-res image will be projected behind the two greats of biodiversity.
This extraordinary backdrop to the Half-Earth event has been devised by Eden Portland.
The tree was designed and carved by the project’s founder Sebastian Brooke, and his fellow stonecarver, Alex Evans.
We would love you to get involved by making your own mason’s mark and sharing it on social media
calling all schools
Any schools who wish to submit mason’s marks:
Please contact Seb for a pack:
Any school marks submitted to us by Friday 5th November will be added to the walls of the mine
We are creating a high resolution CGI image which we will publish in the press and on the website, while COP26 is still taking place.
Grateful thanks to Dorset LEP, Sue Lyons, Albion Stone, DBOX, Weymouth College, Emily Young Sculpture
and staff and students of Atlantic Academy and St. George's Primary School, Portland