The Red Oak of Boschwijk

It was planted for one week a year and it delivers. Red oak is North American, it reached Europe in the seventeenth century, and it was planted across Dutch estates in the nineteenth for a single reason: nothing native here turns that colour. In late October a mature one goes deep scarlet and then rust, and it holds it for a fortnight while the beeches around it are doing their more restrained copper. The leaves are the easy way to tell it from a native oak. They are much larger, with pointed lobes ending in tiny bristles, where a pedunculate oak has small soft rounded lobes and no bristles anywhere. This one stands by the drive to number 7 on the west side of Boschwijk, banded 1860 to 1870, so it is a generation younger than the beech in the avenue and belongs to a later phase of planting on the same ground. The acorns are worth a look too: squat and broad with a shallow saucer of a cup, quite unlike the neat long acorn of a native oak, and they take two years to ripen rather than one.