The Trees of the Alliance

A beech and an oak are not supposed to manage this. Beech is the shade specialist of European forests: it can germinate under a closed canopy, sit in the gloom for years, then close the canopy itself and starve out anything that needs light. Sessile oak needs light. The two also keep different clocks, oaks generally outliving beeches by a long way. So a full-sized beech and a full-sized sessile oak growing directly against each other is odd enough that the forest register singles it out, calling it rare to find two large trees with such different demands for light and such different lifespans standing this close. Both are around 90 to 120 years old and roughly 30 metres tall. Which of those figures belongs to which trunk we cannot say: the register measured the pair as one entry and published one set of numbers, so treat them as describing the couple rather than either tree. They stand on the path that circles the Mare Epinay, near the Petit Charme arboretum, which also puts them a few minutes from the Gadeau de Kerville oak. Park at the pond, walk the loop, and you have two of Roumare's registered trees in one flat kilometre.