For all their deserved reputation for solid longevity, oak trees have an alarming habit of dropping their antlers from a great height without warning. Along the lane, I found such a grounding after the August gales, not so much a branch as a limb so huge and full of sprouting twigs that it was if this had been a tree within a tree, birthed on a grass verge. Roughly six metres long, it had a crusty lichen-splashed trunk as thick as my thigh, and, as I was to discover, it weighed as much as me.
I wondered, did the crown mourn its fall? I could see no sign of loss up in the canopy, no broken splinters or yellow stump. The oak hid its bereavement in a mass of boughs and foliage.
In those first days, the broken piece kept kinship with its parent in green leaves and still-ripening acorns. But then the leaves gradually began to shrivel to grey. The tree above cast a shadow, passing dogs cocked their legs over it, and the living branch soon became dead wood.
A month later I was acting as its self-appointed undertaker, intending to take some of it to our habitat pile for bugs and beetles, and cremate the rest in winter fires. I always cut with a handsaw, and feel the strength and character of a tree as I work. Willow loses its thick bark as easily as shedding a coat on a hot day, but an oak’s gritty bark holds fast and its heart is denser. It resisted every draw of the blade through 34 years of growth.
This had been a healthy limb, apart from a bark-free prong at the tip of one fork. So why had the tree cast off an apparently fully functioning part? Could the “intelligence” that scientists have discovered in a tree’s root system also apply in managing its own crown? Are trees even smarter than we think?
I raised the last log on my shoulder and carried it away as if I were a pallbearer. Back home, I prepared the pieces for their afterlife, trimming off side twigs with their shrivelled leaves and yellow-brown acorns, cutting them into shorter lengths, stripping away the last vestiges of a tree’s identity.
