Liverpool keeps its two remarkable trees in one public park in Allerton. The Allerton Oak there was voted England's Tree of the Year in 2019, taking 34 percent of more than eleven thousand votes, and went on to represent England in the European contest. It is split down the middle, hollow, and propped on metal crutches since 1907, and it still drops something like a hundred thousand acorns a year. The sweet chestnut a short walk away is almost seven metres round, with bark that spirals as it climbs. One gate, one afternoon.
0 of 2 visited in Liverpool
1
The Allerton Oak
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · widely said to be around 1,000 years (traditional estimate, undated) · Calderstones Park, Allerton
In 2019 this oak took 34 percent of more than eleven thousand votes and was named England's Tree of the Year, then went on to represent England in the European competition. It had already won the English title once before, in 2014.
It is everywhere called a thousand years old. That number is tradition, not measurement: the trunk is hollow, which rules out ring counting, and nobody wrote down a planting. The honest band runs from about 400 years to that thousand. What can be measured is a girth of 5.5 metres and a trunk split from top to bottom.
Two stories attach to the split and neither is settled. One says the local hundred court sat under its branches in the Middle Ages, which is why it is also called the Law Oak, though some historians prefer the neolithic Calderstones nearby as the meeting place. The other blames the Lottie Sleigh, a ship carrying eleven tonnes of gunpowder that blew up on the Mersey on 15 February 1864 and was felt across Liverpool. Historic Liverpool's verdict is that no one can really say.
Metal crutches have carried its heaviest limbs since 1907, replaced from 2019 by adjustable modern props at a cost near eighty thousand pounds. It still drops something like a hundred thousand acorns a year. A Liverpool Echo piece in the 1970s predicted it would be dead by 2020.
Read more and get directions →
2
The Calderstones Sweet Chestnut
Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa) · roughly 280 years (derived from girth) · Calderstones Park, Allerton
The age of this sweet chestnut comes from a division sum. The Liverpool Botanical Society measured its girth at 683 centimetres on a field walk in October 2015, then divided by 2.5 centimetres a year, the growth rate they use for a tree in good condition carrying a full crown, and arrived at 273 years. Add the decade since and the answer is somewhere near 280. That is a method rather than a measurement, which is why the band here runs from 230 to 330 years and why nobody should quote a planting date for it.
The size is not in question. At close to seven metres round this is a large sweet chestnut by any standard, though a long way short of the British champions, which run from roughly nine to fourteen metres. The bark is the thing to look at: sweet chestnut ridges twist as the tree ages, and on this trunk they spiral right round. The society's own note on the day was short and admiring, a huge tree with characteristic spiralled bark and lots of fruit.
It shares Calderstones Park with the Allerton Oak and with dozens of other exotic specimens, including a giant sequoia planted as recently as 1964. Only one source has ever written this tree up. If you know of another, or you know exactly where in the park it stands, tell us.
Read more and get directions →