About Oak Trees

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago”
Warren Buffett

There is an old saying about oak trees... Three hundred years growing, three hundred years living, three hundred years dying...Our beautiful English Oak is a huge, spreading tree, reaching up to 40 metres high and to put that in context, that's roughly about the same height as four houses stacked on top of each other, so it's a pretty big tree then! And it gets better – they can live for up to a thousand years!

Oak Tree

In the British landscape, our living oaks are cherished. The heritage and conservation of veteran oaks can hardly be matched by any other trees. The two largest known Oaks in Britain are in Kent and Lincolnshire and they both measure 40feet around the trunk – so they've got a pretty huge waistline too!

Acorn

The oak is a common symbol of strength and endurance and many of us can recognise an oak tree together with its leaves and acorns when we would struggle to do the same with any other native tree, so ingrained are they in our heritage. We see them depicted regularly in carvings, sculpture; and art and they are the subject matter for much poetry; surely everybody has heard the saying “great oaks from little acorns grow” Do you know any sayings about any other of our native trees?

Free Range Pig

On the subject of acorns, did you know that a fully-grown oak tree can produce over 40,000 of them in a good year? Pigs and other animals just love to eat acorns and traditionally animal stock was turned into woods to gorge themselves on acorns so they could fatten up before the long winter ahead.

They didn't start off here of course, they came here after the last Ice Age when we were still joined to Europe by land mass (where the English Channel is now).

Oak Trunk

Thousands of years later, we were glad to have them, the timber from the trees was found to be incredibly strong and was used to make all manner of things from houses to barrels to furniture and ships. Thousands of trees were used for shipbuilding and many were replanted for this very reason and if it wasn't for the fact that the British Navy turned from timber ships to iron ships in the late 1800's our countryside would look quite different.

Oak Leaves

As well as our English Oak, there are Hungarian, Spanish, Turkey and Pyrenean Oaks; there's a Downy Oak, a Holm Oak and a Sessile Oak (also reasonably common in Britain); and there's a Pin Oak, Red Oak and Scarlet Oak and also Cork Oak, which is grown mainly in the Mediterranean that has a very thick, spongy bark which is stripped off the tree every seven years or so and is used to make corks, mainly used as stoppers in wine bottles. Oh and a Japanese Oak that is used to make Yammaha drums; I could go on...