Pedunculate Oak

Foresters used to say an oak spends three hundred years growing, three hundred resting, and three hundred slowly dying. The pedunculate oak, Quercus robur, is the tree that adage was built on: the classic broad English oak of parkland and legend, though it grows just as happily in Amsterdam or Berlin. Its trick for extreme age is to hollow out. As the heartwood rots away the tree keeps only its living outer sleeve, which lightens the load and can extend its life past a thousand years. That is why the oldest oaks are the fattest and most gnarled, not the tallest. Kings prized them enough to wall entire parks around them, and their timber built the navies and cathedrals of northern Europe. These are the ancient oaks mapped on the site so far, oldest first.