It has been two decades since Yoko Ono returned to Coventry Cathedral to plant a new pair of oak saplings—a quiet yet poignant gesture that bridged memory, loss, and the enduring spirit of peace. The date was 14 October 2005, when hundreds gathered to watch Ono, now an icon of conceptual art and activism, revisit the site where she and John Lennon’s first public peace action had taken root nearly four decades earlier.
“It was here in Coventry that the first public manifestation of our message occurred,” Ono told the crowd. “So it is great to be back here 37 years later, to continue something we started together. John would have loved it.”
That original act, in 1968, had been both tender and provocative. The couple submitted Acorns for Peace to the Exhibition of British Sculpture, held in the Cathedral’s ruins — a white, wrought-iron, circular bench enclosing two acorns, intended to grow together into a living sculpture. It was a symbolic marriage of East and West, of art and nature, of hope and defiance — and like much of Ono’s work, it provoked both admiration and confusion.
Cathedral staff, unsure how to interpret the work, quietly relocated it — an intervention that provoked Lennon’s anger and, soon after, a minor cultural farce. The acorns vanished within weeks, exhumed and lacquered by overeager fans in search of relics. What began as an act of peace became a lesson in how fragile idealism can appear when set against public fascination.
When Ono returned in 2005, she restored the gesture rather than the artefact, planting two Japanese oak saplings in Cuckoo Lane beside the Cathedral ruins. It was a pared-back act of renewal — not nostalgic, but forward-looking. The trees, now mature, stand as quiet witnesses to an experiment that once merged art, activism, and intimacy into a single living symbol.
The story recently took another unexpected turn. The original acorns — or what is believed to be them — resurfaced last year after being discovered by retired police sergeant Mike Davies. Found boxed and forgotten, they had been handed in decades earlier by a man arrested for drink-driving who confessed to stealing them from the Cathedral grounds. The preserved nuts, coated in clear nail varnish, were later displayed at the Beatles Museum in Liverpool — artefacts of an era when small acts of symbolism carried global weight.
A replica of the Lennon Bench, crafted initially for Theatre Absolute’s production of The Lennon Bench, now sits in the Coventry Music Museum. Together, the trees, the bench, and the rediscovered acorns form a loose constellation — reminders of a time when peace itself was treated as an artistic material, and when a pair of artists dared to imagine it could take root.
Photo: Eva Rinaldi Wiki Media Commons