Tiny Sprouts Spotted at the Stump of the Fallen Sycamore Gap Tree

On a fine, bright morning last Friday, just like so many other fine, bright mornings, Gary Pickles took a walk.

Mr. Pickles, a ranger who works at Northumberland National Park in England, just south of the Scottish border, was inspecting a route that wends past Hadrian’s Wall, constructed by the Roman Army in the second century A.D. He walked past the cleft where the Sycamore Gap tree had famously jutted out into the landscape before it was illegally cut down last year, and he bent down to its stump.

Astonishingly, improbably, there were eight shoots where the tree once stood. Eight signs of life.

“It was like when you see an old friend,” Mr. Pickles, 54, said. “‘Oh, you’re back, are you?’”

Mr. Pickles’s discovery, announced on Thursday by the park and the National Trust, a British conservation society, is a step toward national healing. The felling of the tree last September shocked and horrified many British people. Why would anyone ax something so lovely, so alive?

“People felt like their landscape — their heritage — was violated,” said Rob Collins, a professor at Newcastle University who is a specialist in Hadrian’s Wall archaeology.