Veteran

Day 281 #365DaysWild

We have the photographed oak (dated by a NWT officer) at around 200 years old..? 

It’s on our boundary (now with Crimea Plantation) and so may be one of the Bestwood standard trees that we see in

New Farm hedges which date back to the old days of the tenure of the Dukes of St. Albans tenure.

Unfortunately, the adjacent wood receives lots of trespassers and so we have had to fence the boundary. We’ve skipped around the tree with fencing to protect it.

As you can see it has a bough that has fallen and looks as though it’s rooted. This is characteristic of oaks.

It also has a nasty gash caused, we guess, by previous owners’ securing barbed wire.

This process is called ‘veteranisation’, providing niches and cavities for invertebrates and fungi.

The tree was becoming swamped by sweet chestnut and so we have created a halo around the tree to give it space to grow.

Is this the sort of tree that needs listing somewhere?

Oaks, we are told, grow for three hundred years, live for three hundred years and die for three hundred years. 

To a human, an unimaginable lifespan and perhaps explaining our own short-term thinking about the world.

Certainly unimaginable to us is life in 2824.