9/11 A Tree in the Memorial Gardens

In the Memorial Gardens, to the left of the fountains, opposite the old gents' toilets in the undercroft, adjacent to the Hornbeam dedicated to Don Scott, the former Chair of Education for the Nottingham City Council, behind the great stone arch that commemorates the city's dead of the First World War, stands a European beech with its own small plaque. It reads:

This tree was planted by The Right Worshipful the Lord Mayor of Nottingham Councillor Des Wilson on behalf of the people of Nottingham in memory of the victims of the September 11 atrocities

There is no date on the plaque. But it is not hard to work one out. Des Wilson served as Lord Mayor of Nottingham twice: for a year from May 2002, and again from 2006. The first of those terms spans the first anniversary of the attacks, in September 2002 — the moment at which a city would most naturally have planted a tree of remembrance. I really can't find any record of the actual event. I was hoping for a photo from the Nottingham Evening Post, but no, nothing apart from the plaque exists (that I can find).

Des Wilson was born in Lucea, Jamaica, and came to Nottingham in 1957 as a teenager. In 2002 he became the city's first Black Lord Mayor in more than seven hundred years of the office's history, a milestone he repeated when re-elected in 2006.

The tree is easy to walk past. It marks no battle, no local casualty, no name that Nottingham would otherwise have cause to remember. What it marks is solidarity — a gesture from a city thousands of miles from Manhattan, Arlington and rural Pennsylvania, made on behalf of people it had never met.

That solidarity had a formal echo, too. Within hours of the attacks, NATO's members invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty (on the 12th, but it took a while to finalise)— the collective defence clause under which an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all. It has been invoked only once in the alliance's history, and it was invoked for the United States. Troops from Britain and more than a dozen other NATO countries went on to serve in Afghanistan as a direct consequence.

That campaign lasted twenty years, and it is worth setting the trees life beside it as we commemorate its' 24th anniversary of planting. Between 2001 and the withdrawal in 2021, 457 British service and Ministry of Defence personnel died in Afghanistan.

This European Beech tree in the Memorial Gardens was never intended as a monument to that war; it predates it by weeks, planted in humble response to an atrocity rather than in anticipation of what would follow.

It is worth holding onto the distinction the tree itself only gestures at (in my opinion). The United States of America was attacked, and Article 5 was invoked for the first and only time to date. This was a legal obligation—allies were mandated by treaty to step up and support the defense of the United States. Choosing to go to war against others is a very different matter, and doesn't allow NATO to act in the same way it had to do following 9/11. Pete