Eden Wild Goose Nature
Nature notes from the Focus Magazine July 2021

Oak Tree

Do you ever wish you could pop into a time machine and travel back a few years, get out and have a peek around for a day or so, see what’s of interest and then nip back in and zoom forward safely back to our present, rather cossetted era? Maybe it’s just me… though I don’t reckon so.
 
Or do you ever want to get up close and personal to a big strong tree and give it a great big hug? Now you might not admit to it… but I don’t believe that’s just me either!
 
Behind both these random ruminations stands the lofty and billowing oak tree that stands, sentinel-like, at the top of the driveway here, a steady observer of everything that happens from the flooding to the blooming to the harvesting to the challenging, dark days of winter.
 
My job is to love that tree and everything- but everything – it means. Just sometimes it’s hard to feel the love because its summer vastness and abundance so effectively blocks the sky and the light and warmth of the sun from the kitchen and, come Autumn and winter, I swear the leaf collecting never stops. Still,
I tell myself the latter is good, sturdy exercise at a time of year when I might be stuck inside, and as for the sunlight issue- if I listen deeper, the tree tells me to ‘get over it’ and rejoice instead at the abundant life that each leaf
is streaming.
 
I observe and picture it as a living high rise home, its different stratas providing habitats for birds, beetles, bacteria, fungi, lichens and mammals from roots to canopy, a smorgasbord of goodness.
 
I don’t know how old this particular tree is, certainly not over 250 years, I’d guess, though if it was, it would be classified as officially ‘ancient’- and in oak tree language, that’s good. Maybe it’s about as old as Holme Eden Church, 180 years or so, which if not ancient, is surely venerable. And that’s the link to the time travel- I’d love to see what the tree might have been seeing back then. Peter Dixon (THE Peter Dixon!!) and his entourage drawing up in their barouche perhaps, a bewhiskered and well upholstered clergyman obsequiously greeting the party at the church door, while mill workers families, washed and scrubbed and wearily obedient, pick their way along the muddy mill path, looking forward later to a dip in the river and relieved to be free of the mill for a day. And all the while, the church bell tolls, making sure no one can forget their Sunday duty.
 
The oak tree, all our oak trees, holding huge significance in our national history and in natural history, home to 1000’s of forms of life including 326 species which depend solely on oak trees;
a source of myths and folklore, formerly a place to be wed, a sometime hideout for kings and a provider of timber for the navy.
 
Go on, I dare you, while no one’s looking, get in there and give your nearest oak tree a hug, whisper sweet nothings and promise to do your bit to honour it and look after it. And – added bonus- that will also do you good too.
 
Philippa Skinner

Woodland Trust Trees