To all intents and purposes, a bloody great weed.

I absolutely love trees, and I get quite irate when they get cut down.

One of the aspects of life with which I most often find myself most at odds with my fellow man is that I'm not really a fan of the tidy garden. I like to see a bit of biodiversity knocking about the gaff, and to that end I welcome the somewhat overgrown hedge, am pro the bit of lawn left to run riot, and, most of all, very anti cutting down trees.

I love the things, habitat, provider of shade, easy on the eye, home to the songbirds that delight the ear at dawn, the best alarm clock of all. To me, cutting a naturally growing tree down is an act of errant vandalism, as well as monumental entitlement, it's been around longer than you.

So, this being the case, let me say this. The public outcry over the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap is sentimental, overblown nonsense, and the fact that the two men found guilty of it have been given a custodial sentence is completely insane. Prison? For cutting down a Sycamore? Not one of the last stately elms, not a thousand year old oak but a sycamore? A tree that is, to all intents and purposes, a bloody great weed?

I get that it was "iconic", a somewhat overused word, but the full weight of the law being brought to bear against Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers does seem to be somewhat heavy-handed.

Acer Pseudoplatanus is not actually a native tree to these Isles, though, having been here since the 1500s it's pretty well naturalised. Its native range is from Asia to central Europe. It's also a fast-growing, extremely hardy generalist, in Portugal and New Zealand it's classed as an invasive pest. This particular example wasn't especially old, having been planted in the 19th century, nor was it particularly unique, having originally stood with several others all of which have been, for one reason or another, cut down, presumably without the need for custodial sentences.

So why did this particular tree get the public right in the feels? Why did people who would have no qualms about ripping up a hawthorn and a dog rose to make way for a tarmacked driveway get their knickers in a twist about a tree cuttings of which are already thriving?

Some of it, I suppose, is because it was on its own, the splendid isolation and dramatic location lending it an air of grandeur. To my mind, though, a solitary tree is a sad thing, and indication of an overgrazed, over-managed landscape, a solitary tree tells a story of you trees being razed to the ground by sheep, in no way is a solitary tree a "natural" feature, particularly not a sycamore which, as anyone who's got a couple nearby will know, is a startlingly prolific and vigorous beast.

Some of it will be celebrity, the tree was famous due in part to its appearance in the risible Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves where Kevin Costner, having strolled from Hastings to Hadrian's Wall in a day, completely bypassing Nottingham and Sherwood Forest in the process, rescues a boy stuck in its branches. It was on tea towels and key rings, local people felt its loss keenly.

And I don't mean to disparage their feelings at all, I am certainly not celebrating its felling, but where was all this concern for trees when ancient deciduous woodland was being ripped up by the acre for HS2? There are five million front gardens in the UK with no plants in them at all, 4.5 million completely paved over, where's the outrage about that? A few years ago the council felled five healthy poplars that marked the border between a playing field and farmland, no one said a peep, it certainly didn't become a front page story on the BBC website.

Certainly, the defendants made for unsympathetic villains, their testimony a whining mishmash of name-calling and blame-laying, the crime without reason or justification. But still the punishment seems unlikely to fit it. Sentencing takes place on the 15th of July and the presiding judge, Mrs Justice Lambert, has told the pair to expect "lengthy" custodial sentences. The maximum penalty for crominal damage is 10 years. What good would this serve? To what end? Why should this pair be housed and fed by the state, when they could be paying their debt to society by, oh, I don't know, doing community service planting trees?

The reason, I suspect, absurd though it is, is simply the high public profile of the case. Because it's been made such a big deal, the full force of the law has to be seen to be applied, even if it's entirely disproportionate.

And the reason I think it's got such a high profile is that it's a release valve for the guilt we all, to a greater or lesser extent, consciously or subconsciously carry for the damage we've wrought to the environment. You have to be in deep denial not to acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing, even the most myopic, three-holidays-a-year drive-100-yards-to-the-shops denier knows, deep in their soul, that we've fucked it, lads.

And so all this loathing and shame manifests itself as opprobrium for Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers, pours over their heads, two rough-arsed, ill-spoken proxies for all the crimes we commit in the name of our lifestyles, every day, currently being held in protective custody. It was just a sycamore, but it stands for a whole lot more.