The Illustrated Book of Trees
Separate male and female flowers are borne on the same tree, the former in slender dropping catkins, the latter singly or in spikes. The flowers are small, inconspicuous, and wind-pollinated.
The fruit is the familiar acorn, a single-seeded nut sitting in an open scaly cup. The seed-leaves remain inside the germinating acorn.
There are 2 native species.
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus Robur) and Sessle Oak (Quercus Petraea)
They are both deep-rooted deciduous trees reaching 30m or more and have thick, deeply fissured bark. Buds are clustered at the end of twigs. Flowers open in April or May.
The Colour Guide to Familiar Trees
Grows to an age of 600-800 years old.
Up to about 20-30 years of age the bark is smooth and grey, in older trees it tends to become more blackish-grey and deeply furrowed.
The common Pedunculate Oak grows mainly in moist bottomlands; it is the principle tree of lowland forests.
Trees: Woodlands and Western Civilisation
'No living things have had more impact on human sensibility than trees. Trees are special. They are bigger than us physically and metaphorically'
'We love trees both for their physical nature and their symbolic potential. A tree's roots, trunk and branches, bearing fruit and changing with the seasons, have an inherent attractiveness to symbolic and associative thinking.'
'Trees span many lifetimes and have always been used as historical markers,bringing the past closer to the present, and ensuring that trees planted in commemoration of some event or person will outlive those who planted them.'
'Trees have roots in the ground and reach up to the sky, linking earth with heaven, a rich potential which has been tapped by nearly all of the worlds mythologies'
'The Garden of Eden had been planted by God, and its first inhabitants enjoyed some of its tress for their beauty and others for their fruit, as God intended. In paradise, God himself, was among trees.'
'Trees had become one of the mystical elements that made England England'.
'Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak and Ash and Thorn.'
'What is not questionable is that, for humanities sake, we need to keep the woodlands we have and to plant new ones.'
'The ecological value of woodlands is widely recognised and the most familiar friends of wooded places still include ornithologists and mycologists with the dog walkers and photographers.'
'David Nash is actively engaged in the landscape, and with trees in particular, as a source of inspiration and materials, but also as a stage which his works grow.'
'Andy Goldsworthy established his reputation as a land artist by making rapid sculptures with natural found materials, usually in one of a series of well-established forms of arches, spirals, lines and spheres, the photographing them before the disintegrate naturally.'
A Guide to Countryside Conservation
If we go back 4000BC the neolithic people were the first to set about cutting down natural forests which blanketed much of Britain.' 'The oak woods were gradually penetrated for the timber and food, though the going was sticky and slow.'
'The Saxons make inroads into the forest by establishing settlements on the banks of rivers, clearing the forest and tilling the virgin land.
"Gradually we started to reap the spoils of the forest, not only for timber and fuel, but by bringing in sheep, goats and pigs to eat the acorn bonanza.'
'It is thought that the English Oak has the potential to live up to 2,000 years'
