What does an acorn look like?

Some acorns harvested from different species of oak tree around my home near the DMZ.

Recently, my neighbour in our village near the DMZ had hundreds of acorns laid out in front of his house in preparation for being soaked so the bitter tannins are leached away to make acorn powder for the jelly called dotori-mok.  As I mentioned in a previous post from this time last year, acorn jelly is very popular over here.  It’s very nutritious. A few days ago, a colleague of my wife’s assured her that it’s renowned for helping lower blood pressure. So, in today’s post I will indulge my interest in the oak tree again, and in the second part I’ll share some fascinating European oak ‘politics’.

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In Korean, to describe what we call the oak tree they often say 참나무, cham namu, which literally translates as ‘true tree’ , but also 떡갈 나무, tteoggal namu, which generically refers to all native species of oak tree but is actually the name of one species, Quercus dentata. My neighbour’s acorns probably came from Quercus Acutissima, aka the sawtooth oak, Quercus dentata, aka the sweet oak or daiymo oak, or Quercus aliena, aka oriental white oak or galcham oak, which are common around here. Dentata is less common, as is the generally most common of all the oaks in Korea - Quercus mongolica, the Mongolian oak.

I doubt Europeans and North Americans would recognize most of the nuts and cups gathered in the photo above as belonging to oak trees.   Take a look at four:

Clockwise from top left are acutissima, dentata, mongolica and aliena..

As you can see, the acorn cups of the top two are very different from those of the two most common oaks that were familiar to me and anyone else living in north-western Europe,  which are Quercus petraea, the sessile oak,  and Quercus robur, the pedunculate or common oak (or, as it’s proprietorially known where I come from, the English oak):

On the left here are the acorns of the sessile oak, and at top right of the pedunculate. They are identical, except for the latter having stalks (or peduncules). Source: oak.https://www.gardensillustrated.com/plants/trees/how-to-identify-oak-trees.

Of the six main native species of oak in Korea, only Quercus aliena has acorn cups quite similar to those of European oaks, while Quercus mongolica looks like a more rugged version. Korean and European oaks are also very different in tree structure, bark, and leaf form, but both are also very different from the oaks native to North Americans. So, it’s interesting to consider that although an English person and an American both will say or write ‘oak tree’ and assume they’re referring to the same thing, they’re almost certainly visualizing distinctly different-looking trees.  

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Speaking of Europe, I’ve discovered that the oak tree is interestingly implicated within a complex web of modern-day ideological confrontation and war. 

For example, it came as a shock to learn that the Nazis had a special thing about the oak tree. At the beginning of the twentieth century the German nation’s nature-protection movement was more developed than anywhere else and recognizing that the oak in particular bore the special imprint of German history, German culture, and German habits, attitudes, and tastes. The National Socialists exploited this native love of the forest, and of the oak tree in particular. The Hitler Youth badge of honour contained oak leaves, and its Wandervogel wing of weekend hikers was in some ways a precursor to today’s Forest Schools and other organization which combine education and immersion in nature.  The Party’s motto was blut unt boden (“blood and soil”), and the heady myth of the wild untameable forest as the mystical source of the German Volk’s racial strength and purity was vigorously promoted. The Nazis celebrated the pantheistic dreams of the German Romantic poets, the artist Caspar David Friedrich’s moody paintings of death-haunted winter trees, and the composer Wagner’s Teutonic melodramatic operas, which often have forest settings.  Their propaganda machine even claimed that the briefcase bomb intended to kill Hitler, which was planted by a group of dissident German officers in July 1943, failed to kill its target thanks to the protection afforded by a sturdy German oak table.  

The Nazi’s love of the oak tree also explains why one year-old saplings were presented to the gold medalists at the notorious Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. Interestingly, the choice was not the sessile oak, the dominant species throughout Germany, but the pedunculate, aka the English oak. But the symbolism of the ‘‘Olympic’ or ‘Hitler oaks’ didn’t quite have the intended effect.  Jesse Owens, the African-American athlete who put paid to the Nazi’s Aryan vision of racial athletic superiority by winning spectacularly at the Games, came home with three saplings, one of which is today growing healthily beside Rhodes High School in Cleveland, where Owens trained. 

Jesse Owens with his three Hitler oak sapling. Source :https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/owens-medals 

At How Hill on the UK’s Norfolk Broads there’s a very odd-looking oak tree stump with a yacht carved at the top and the famous symbol of the Olympic Games etched in black onto its side. This is all that now remains today of a Hitler oak planted by the British Olympic yachting team’s helmsman Christopher Boardman: 

Source: http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk/howhill/hitlertree.jpg

As the Nazi’s exploitation of the German people’s affections for the oak tree demonstrates, like many other things in the twentieth century a tree could become an ideological freighted symbol enlisted to further a cause. The German nature myths, the deep-rooted idea that the forest is the shadowy counterpoint to the domesticated values of society and exposes its vulnerability and artificiality, could be perverted with terrible consequences.  

Sometimes the oak tree would be witness to terrible acts of human barbarism; during the Second World War the dense foliage of the great oaks of the primordial forest of Poland, for example, hid places where Jews were shot by German forces and buried in mass graves. And within the dark depths of these same vast eastern European forests, resistance fighters withdrew then suddenly emerged to harry the invading Germans.

Fortunately, the oak could also become a potent anti-Nazi symbol.  In central France in the Forest of Tronçais, near where I have a house, one of the veteran oaks (born around 1640) is today called ‘Chêne de la Résistance’ (The Resistance Tree). But it used to be called ‘The Maréchal Pétain Oak’ in honour of Philippe Pétain, the ruler of the Unoccupied Zone or Vichy France, the notorious regime that collaborated with the Nazis, and under whose jurisdiction the forest was placed at that time. The tree-naming ceremony  in 1940 was held in the leader’s presence, as this archival photograph commemorating the event shows:

 Source: https://zerotrois.fr/baignereau/troncais/resistance

Pétain  was back in the forest again in 1942 visiting the large camps located there of chantiers de jeunesse, a compulsory youth movement similar to the Hitler Youth that required young Frenchmen in the Unoccupied Zone to serve patriotically for a period of time.  But some of the local woodcutters didn’t like having a tree named after the Vichy leader, and  in February 1944, several months before D-Day, three of them scaled the wire protecting the tree, then one climbed the perfectly straight trunk to remove the plaque saying ‘Chêne Maréchal Pétain’, replacing it by a sign that said, “Chêne Gabriel Péri Patriote français fusillé par les nazis” (‘The Gabriel Péri French Patriot Shot by the Nazis Oak’).  Péri was a prominent communist journalist, politician, and member of the Resistance movement.  The woodcutters also adorned the plaque with a huge red bow tie, made from a scarf and tied to the tree with barbed wire. Their rebellious intervention didn’t last long, of course, and it actually took almost forty years before the  tree was officially renamed the ‘Chêne de la Résistance. En Souvenir de l‘acte de 13 Février 1944’, which is what you can see today if you visit the tree:

Source: https://lestetardsarboricoles.fr/wordpress/2016/05/17/le-chene-de-la-resistance-en-foret-de-troncais-allier/

NOTES

My previous posts on oaks and acorns:

https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/acorn-for-dinner

https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/acorns

An excellent book that explores the complex relationship between the oak, the forest, and culture is: Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory. Especially interesting is Chapter 2:

https://www.amazon.com/Landscape-Memory-Simon-Schama/dp/0679735127

Notes from Central France

A view of the Forêt de Tronçais, about 5 kilometers south from our house. The forest is famous for its tall, straight oak trees.

I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been staying in my house in central France – in the far north of the Department of the Allier, trying to keep warm, as I coincided my stay with a decidedly cold snap. A few days after my arrival, one of my ‘prize’ rose – Madame Alfred Carrière – a lovely white climber, came crashing down under the weight of ten centimeters of snow. I had to prune her right back and hope she will survive.

An early morning view from the back window of our house in Ainay-Le-Château, overlooking the garden and the river. ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ used to climb up to this window. The overgrown ruins across the stream are an old tannery. Note the mallard ducks.

Just down the road from the house spreads the immense Forêt de Tronçais, which, at 26,000 acres, is one of the largest stands of oak in western Europe. The forest’s name derives from the old French for the sessile oak (Quercus petraea) – tronce. Although there was a natural forest here for millennia, in the seventeenth century it was established as a Royal Forest expressly to grow very tall and straight oak trees for the French navy. Today, the forest is still a ‘working’ one, actively managed to generate revenue, and is celebrated for supplying timber for wine and brandy barrels (almost all great wines – red or white – are aged in oak, and quite possibly oak from the Forest of Tronçais). In 2021, twenty-six of its more than 200 years old oaks were chosen for the reconstruction of the spire of the fire-devastated cathedral of Notre-Dames de Paris. 

My favourite oak.' ‘La Sentinelle’. Born about 1560! It won’t last much longer, alas.

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As I noted in a previous post, I’m thinking a lot about oak trees these day. I’m writing a ‘biography’ - a cultural history of the oak tree.

Of course, only we humans construct narratives of this history, and it means absolutely nothing to the oak tree, or any non-human species, flora or fauna. But then again, what Homo sapiens has done to the Earth system over the few dozen millennia of its existence on Earth, has impacted more and more forcibly over time on the lives of the oak tree in ways comparable to the five dimensions of its ecosystem: the geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. The congeries of events that comprise the human historical narrative have become part-and-parcel of a sixth ecosystem: the ‘anthroposphere’, which is part-and-parcel of the Anthropocene,  humanity’s sphere of life involving a complex technical system of energy, material, and information.[1]

So, I thought it would be interesting to imagine what our history would be like if considered from the  point of view of the oak  -  say, from the perspective of the sessile and pendunculate oaks that are the main species in northern Europe:

After 56 million years of evolution, these oaks emerged from their Ice Age refuges  around 12,000 years ago, and they would have observed Homo sapiens moving out of Africa alongside them, as they both sought to colonize new terrain as the ice melted, and the landscape of our familiar world emerged.

They would soon (a mere handful of thousand years later) have observed that  the numbers of the human species had multiplied and their social lives become more complex, and  most importantly, that they were now predominantly sedentary. This development obliged the humans to fell more and more trees to make room for the fields they needed for planting crops and grazing animals.

From being one animal species struggling amongst many others, the oaks would have noted that this particular animal had very quickly become the dominant species wherever it colonized. Let’s imagine that the oaks  recognized that this success was because, although compared to them, humans lived very short and vulnerable existences, they overcame this weakness through the development of languages and the creation of sophisticated systems of belief, so could make reference to things beyond the here-and-now, and possessed the ability to discuss possible outcomes in the future.  This allowed them to pass useful knowledge on from one generation to the next.

The oaks would have perceived from interactions with these increasingly confident animals, that they had ceased to treat non-humans as kin, and instead categorised them in two very different ways:  ‘enemies’ or ‘friends’. Unwanted vegetal ‘enemies’ were described as weeds (in French, the word  is mauvaise herbe, which literally means ‘bad plant’, which conveys  more of the anthropocentric character of this distinction). If a plant was cast as an ‘enemy’, humans would consider it waste and seek to   decrease its abundance and impact on their environment. The oaks would have realized that they were usually treated as ‘friends’ by humans because they were useful natural resources. Humans used them as building material, fuel, shade, shelter, lookouts, food, and medicine. Because of this utility, they were afforded protection and respect, which manifested itself in the roles the oak played in human symbolism, ritual, and aesthetic appreciation.

This companionable behaviour obviously benefited the oaks.  Human history seemed to tell a story of protection and increasing abundance, productivity, and stability for the oaks. But they would also have noted that the vegetal ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’ of humans were not always mutually exclusive. Sometimes, they were cast as a vegetal ‘enemies’, as when humans were more interested in cutting down the forests they grew in to make room for fields or habitations. This meant contact with humans had both benefits and costs, depending on the time or the context in which interactions occurred. One could say that the oak was the humans’ ‘frenemy’.

As time went by, the oaks would have seen that something fundamental was changing in their relationship with humans, and that as a result the shape of history was also being transformed. As the oaks were considered by humans as nothing more than a resource to be maximally exploited, the relationship became less and less reciprocal and flexible. The vast oak forests that once covered the Eurasian continent and north and central America were systematically reduced to small, restricted enclaves.   In some regions, oaks were organized into plantations because they were valuable economic resources, and were domesticated like cereals and farm animals. The oaks were now not so much cast as ‘friends’, or even ‘frenemies’ to humanity,  but were their ‘chattel’.

The oaks also noticed that the humans had little concern for the sustainability of the resource they were exploiting, and that as the primordial forests were destroyed, no new ones were being encouraged.  The oaks would have noticed that history had become the story of humans putting immense strain on the Earth’s biocapacity, that the story was one of rash and selfish interventions that overused ecological resources and ran down the potential of every ecosystem humans encountered. But the oaks would also have noticed how humans temporarily avoided the inevitable crises caused by this abuse through the application of science and technology, and that as the modern period developed, were allaying  its negative impact through the harnessing the power of fossil fuels, which permitted them to increase the productivity of land and labour even as they exhausted the resources of the ecosystem. 

But very recently – in the past forty years or so -  the oaks will have noticed a new phase  in human history commencing, one that has been initiated by the depletion of the non-renewable fossil fuels that were exploited for two centuries, and by the consequent emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which was causing a dangerous heating up of the planet.

Like everything else in the Earth system, the oaks were suffering the consequences of this ecological disaster. But they also sensed that the humans wanted to be ‘friends’ again. They needed the oaks, and all the other trees, to help save the planet, because the humans had realized that trees function as carbon reservoirs.  As a result, oaks discovered they were to play a salvific role in human history. But considering what had gone before, one can forgive them for being suspicious about this new overture of friendship!

This is an interesting oak in the forest. It used to be the “Marshal Petain Oak’, named after the leader of Vichy France in 1940. But in February 1944 three foresters took down the plaque and replaced it by one saying “Chêne Gabriel Péri Patriote français fusillé par les nazis” (‘The Gabriel Péri French Patriot Shot by the Nazis Oak’).  Péri was a prominent communist journalist, politician, and member of the Resistance movement.  The woodcutters also adorned the plaque with a huge red bow tie, made from a scarf, and tied to the tree with barbed wire. The rebellious intervention didn’t last long, of course, and it actually took until 1982 for the tree to be officially renamed the ‘Chêne de la Résistance. En Souvenir de l‘acte de 13 Février 1944’. By coincidence, I am writing these lines one day short of exactly 79 years later, and am pleased to say that this oak is still alive and well,  but ‘resisting’ a new enemy: climate change

[1] See:  ‘The Anthroposphere’, The Aspen Global  Change Institute,   https://www.agci.org/earth-systems/anthroposphere. Also: Peter Baccini and Paul H, Brunner, Metabolism of the Antroposphere. Analysis, Evaluation, Design, The MIT Press, Second Edition, 2012.

Acorn for Dinner!

In a previous post I mentioned that here in Korea, eating acorns is still popular. They usually use powdered acorn to make a jelly called Dotori-muk. This weekend, my partner, Eungbok, made some Dotori-muk with flour she purchased from a chef colleague who gathers the acorns herself around where she lives in south Seoul.  Here’s what the flour looks like:

And here’s the jelly, which looks a bit like brown tofu:

Eungok mixed the flour with water, and with sesame oil to give it consistency.  The flavour? I have to admit Dotori-muk doesn’t really have any.  But the jelly-like texture is very pleasant. Anyway, Dotori-muk is usually served with a seasoning sauce or in a soup flavoured with radish and seaweed, which is how we ate it. It’s packed with goodness.  Acorns are very nutritious and filling, while not containing fat, cholesterol,  or sodium. Its health benefits include being an antioxidant, and it’s good for stomach ailments, helping in the promotion of healthy gut bacteria.

The species of oak that are preferred here to make flour are Quercus dentata and Quercus mongolica, whose acorns have less tannin than other oaks. The acorn of Quercus mongolica, aka the Mongolian oak, has a cup somewhat like those of the familiar European oaks but is more bumpy - more rugged, one could say. Quercus dentata, aka Korean oak, Japanese emperor oak, daimyo oak, or sweet oak, has a hugely hairy cup, so this one is very unlike those I’m familiar with from Europe. Like this:

Once upon a time, wherever there were oaks and human beings acorns were a stapple of the latter’s diet. As  David A. Bainbridge writes in a fascinating essay entitled ‘Acorns as Food’ which I found on the Internet :

They occur in the archaeological record of the early town sites in the Zagros Mountains, at Catal Hüyük (6000 BC), and oak trees were carefully inventoried by the Assyrians during the reign of Sargon II. They have been used as food for thousands of years virtually everywhere oak trees are found. In Europe, Asia, North Africa, the Mid-East, and North America, acorns were once a staple food.

They were a staple food for people in many areas of the world until recently and are still a commercial food crop in several countries. The Ch'i Min Yao Shu, a Chinese agricultural text from the sixth century recommends Quercus mongolica as a nut tree. ……..

While it is often thought that oaks were a "wild crop" it is now clear that the oaks were planted, transplanted, and intensively managed. Informants and traditional songs tell of the selection and planting of oak trees. The early travelers often remarked on the “orchard like" settings encountered. How surprised they would be to find they were indeed orchards.

But as agriculture supplanted hunting-and-gathering, grains such as wheat, oats and rice became central to the human diet, and the acorn was relegated to being fodder for animals, such as swine. In medieval Europe in the autumn, swine would be released to forage for acorns in the forests, but their human owners would only recourse to  the nut of the oak in times of want and famine. In other regions of the world, however,  such as in what became California,  Europeans arriving in  the nineteenth century found that native American tribes treated acorns as a vital part of their diet. Of the situation today, Bainbridge writes:

A large commercial harvest still occurs in China, and acorns are sold on the streets by acorn vendors. The commercial harvest in Korea (where 1-2.5 million liters are harvested each year) provides prepared acorn starch and flour that reaches the American markets. Some acorns are collected in Japan. Acorns are still harvested and used in several areas of the United States, most notably Southern Arizona and California. There is still some harvesting in Mexico. Historically acorns were particularly important in California. For many of the native Californians, acorns made up half of the diet and the annual harvest probably exceeded the current sweet corn harvest in the state.

Why did the acorn get demoted in many places?  It’s true that it takes time and effort to make an oak nut edible. An acorn is full of tannin, and so needs to be leached with water. But as Bainbridge writes:

Studies at Dong-guk University in Seoul, South Korea showed the tannin level in one species of bitter acorns was reduced from 9% to 0.18% by leaching, without losing essential amino acids. Virtually all of the acorns the native Californians used were bitter and they were leached or soaked in water to remove the bitterness. They apparently based their preference on oil content, storability, and flavor rather than sweetness. 

Perhaps after the agricultural ‘revolution’, acorns, like all the other nuts that were once foraged by hunter-gatherers,  were on an unconscious level too deeply associated with more ‘primitive’ stages of  social development, and so had to be relegated, lest they remind humanity of the price they had paid for becoming sedentary and toilers of the soil. After all, Jared Diamond calls the agricultural revolution “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”  Hunter-gatherers had a more varied diet, including fats, proteins and vitamins…..and acorns.  Farmers’ diet were simpler and less diverse, and they were constantly at risk of crop failure……when they would revert to the time-honoured convention of eating acorns. Add to this the fact that sedentism vastly increased  the likelihood of contracting communicable diseases, and the agricultural revolution does start to seem less than magnificent evidence of humanity’s ability to perpetually develop towards greater general prosperity and well-being.

And now that the next  ‘revolution’ -  the industrial -  is proving far from an unalloyed success, too, there are sound reasons for re-adopting the acorn as part of our diet. As Bainbridge writes:

There is a growing recognition that tree crops can play an important role in sustainable food production. Trees can be grown with less annual disturbance of the agricultural ecosystem and their deep roots allow the trees to reach nutrients and moisture in the deep soil. Acorns are an excellent example of a grain that grows on trees. We must begin to consider these traditional crops that fit temperate and semi-arid climates rather than trying to change the environment to fit crops that require extensive inputs of fertilizer and water.

I also noted  in my previous post a great TED Talk by Marcie Mayer the founder of Oakmeal, who certainly concurs with Bainbridge’s view on the future of the acorn as food. Here’s a link to the company’s website: https://www.oakmeal.com/

References:

David A. Bainbridge, ‘Acorns as Food. History, use, recipes, and bibliography’, Sierra Nature Prints, 2001.

https://www.academia.edu/3829415/Acorns_as_Food_Text_and_Bibliography

Acorns

This morning we woke up to the first frost of the season. But the temperature quickly rose, and as I write this at around 10.30am it’s already quite warm outside in the bright autumn sunshine.

I’ve been getting to know the oak tree. Turns out there are many more kinds than I expected. Over 500, in fact.  But in the UK and France there are basically just two indigenous species: the Pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) and the Sessile oak (Quercus petraea), and they are almost identical – the difference lies most obviously in the fact that the former grows its acorns on stalks while the latter does not.  

Here in Korea, there are six indigenous species, and they are very different one from the other. Within just half a mile of our house we’ve identified five. Here are their acorns:

This is how I’ve identified them: Top left: Korean oak (Quercus dentata). Top right: Mongolian oak (Quercus mongolica). Bottom left: Sawtooth oak (Quercus acutissima). Bottom right:  Oriental white oak (Quercus aliena). Bottom centre: Oriental white oak (Quercus aliena var. acutiserrata)…. Maybe.

The most common around here is the Oriental white oak, which also has acorns that are most like the ones I’m familiar with from England and France. But the most common nationwide are the Sawtooth and Mongolian oak.

Here’s a map showing distribution ratio within South Korea. Looks like we live in an area that’s more than 40% oak trees :

The Korean oak is my favourite, and it has really huge leaves. I took a photo with my hand superimposed to give some idea of just how big:

Over the past couple of weeks locals have been out collecting acorns because they are used to make a nutritious jelly – Dortori-muk.  When I did a bit of research about acorns as a food, I came across this fascinating TED Talk by an American woman Marcia Meyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vi-1s1Bjs4

French Roses and Oak Trees

Some Rose News

It’s been a while since I wrote my blog, the reason being that I’ve been in my house in central France over the summer. It’s the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two-and-a-half years! Although others have been staying there, and keeping an eye on the garden, several of the roses I planted just before I left the last time (in February 2020) didn’t make it, alas. And July-August isn’t the best time to enjoy the rose-garden. But several roses were in bloom. Here’s one: Reine des Violettes , a wonderfully fragrant magenta coloured Hybrid Perpetual, cultivated in France and in commerce since 1860.

In my book By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose I write that Hybrid Perpetuals “were crosses with Portland, Chinas, and Bourbon Roses, and are upright plants about six feet tall, quite fragrant, and mostly pink or red. Between 1850 and 1900 they were considered the characteristically new or modern roses. As the name suggests, Hybrid Perpetuals inherited the remontancy characteristic from being crossed with a Chinese parent. This longer blooming period became a hugely appealing new feature for European rose growers. But the Hybrid Perpetuals would soon be overshadowed by the Hybrid Teas, which possess the general habit of the Hybrid Perpetuals but have the more elegantly shaped buds and free-flowering character of their parent, the Chinese Tea Rose.“

Concerning my book about roses, I’m pleased to say that it is now available in Italian. Here’s the back and front cover:

A New Project?

I’ve been thinking about the oak tree because just down the road from my house in France straddles the immense Forest of Tronçais, which at 26,000 acres is one of the largest stands of sessile oak (Quercus petraea) in western Europe. Amongst other things, the Forest is celebrated for supplying oak wood for wine and brandy barrels; almost all great wines – red or white – are aged in oak, and quite possibly oak from the Forest of Tronçais. In 2021, twenty-six of its more than 200 years old oaks were chosen for the reconstruction of the spire of the fire-devastated cathedral of Notre-Dames de Paris.

It is not too much to say that human civilization is both literally and metaphorically built on oak trees like those in the Forest of Tronçais. For millennia, oak lumber was the premier building material for houses, boats, and furniture. The oldest surviving Viking longboat is made of oak.  Oak wood also served as fuel in the form of logs, and later, as charcoal.  The acorn was an abundant and nutritious food.  The bark was used in the production of leather. It was also valued medicinally as an antiseptic and hemostatic, a pacifying agent in inflammation, a healing agent for burns, and a cure toothache and gastropathies. Many important manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells and the American Declaration of Independence, were written in ink made of oak gall,  produced by wasp larvae who live on the oak tree.  The  oak is central to many myths and religions, especially of Europe. The Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, and Teutonic tribes all venerated the oak tree above all other trees. The ‘Golden Bough’ that serves as the title to James Frazer’s celebrated foundational text on world mythologies was sheltered within a sanctuary of sacred oak trees. In Celtic mythology, the oak symbolized the virtues of strength, courage, and wisdom, and the word ‘Druid’ may derive from the Celtic meaning “knower of the oak tree.” Contemporary witches suggest hanging a sprig of oak in the house to ward off negativity, strengthen family unity, afford protection, and promote prosperity.

At the western edge of the forest stands a very old oak named La Sentinelle. Born around 1580, during the Wars of Religion then raging in the region (and that led to the sacking of my village, and the destruction of its walled château) La Sentinelle means ‘The Sentry’ or ‘The Watchman’ . It’s my favorite of the ancient oaks in the forest, and I always make a point of visiting it and giving it a hug. Here it is as of early July, 2022:

As you can see, La Sentinelle certainly looks its age. Deeply fissured, gnarled, and cracked, and not very elegant looking, it would take four people with arms outstretched to gird its stocky, nobly, trunk.  It puts me in mind of a story of the Chinese sage, Chuang Tzu, or Zhuangzi, (369—298 B.C.E). Here it is as translated by Solala Towler in Chuang Tzu – The Inner Chapters, the Classic Taoist Text (2010):

Once a master carpenter named Shih was travelling with his apprentice on his way to the state of Chi. When they arrived in Chu Yuan village they passed a huge old oak tree sheltering the village shrine. It was huge, large enough to fit several thousand oxen under its branches. It was 100 spans and towered over everything else in the village with its lowest branches a full 80 feet in the air. These branches were so large they could have been made into a dozen boats. Many people were standing under it, their necks craned as they tried to see the top. But the master carpenter did not even turn his head as they passed it; but walked on without stopping for a moment.

His apprentice took one look at the immense tree and ran after his master saying: “Since I first took up the axe to train with you Master, I have never seen a tree as magnificent. Yet you do not even look at it, much less stop. Why is this?”

The carpenter said, “Enough! Not another word about this tree! Its wood is useless. A boat made from its timber would sink; a coffin would rot before you could put it into the ground; any tool you made from it would snap. It has too much sap in it to make a door, and a beam made from its wood would be full of termites. Altogether it is a completely useless tree and that is why it has lived so long.”

One night, after he returned home, the ancient tree came to the carpenter in a dream and spoke to him. “What are you comparing me too,” it asked, “useful trees like cherry, apple, pear, orange, citron and all the other useful trees? Yet for these trees, as soon as the fruit is ripe they are stripped; their branches are broken and torn off. It is their usefulness that causes them so much abuse. Instead of living out the years heaven has given them they are cut off halfway through. So it is for living things. This is why I have worked so long to cultivate the spirit of uselessness. I was almost cut down several times but I have been able to attain a great level of uselessness and this has been very useful to me. If I had been more useful I would never have attained the great age that I have, and grown so large.

“The two of us are similar. We are both just beings in the world. How is it that we go about judging other beings? You, an old and worthless man, about to die, how can you judge me and call me worthless?”

Shih the carpenter awoke then and spent a long time lying in his bed trying to understand this strange dream. Later, when he shared his dream with his apprentice the young man said, “If this ancient tree is so interested in being useless why has it allowed itself to become part of the village shrine?”

His master said, “It is only pretending to be a shrine. It is its way of protecting itself. Even though its timber is useless, if it were not a shrine it would have been cut down long ago. It is totally different from other trees. You cannot hope to understand it!”

La Sentinelle is on last legs, its death accelerated by climate change. Since I last visited, it had lost several of its huge branches..

I realize my life has been intertwined with the oak from almost the beginning. The house I grew up in had a pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) – the most common kind of oak in England - growing in the garden. It was much taller and much older than the house and completely dominated the garden. In the summertime, all I could see out my bedroom window were its leaves and branches, which almost but not quite reached close enough for me to leap out the window into its canopy, like the young aristocrat in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (1957), who rebels against his dull family by climbing into an oak tree in the garden and then refuses to come down - ever. Today, in South Korea, the hills around my house are mostly covered in young oak trees. The majority are Quercus dentata, which is smaller in size than the typical European oaks, but has the largest leaves of any – some are bigger than my open hand. 

in the not to distant future my burgeoning interest in the oak tree will bear fruit as a new book. And in my next post I’ll be over my jet lag and ruminating once again on things Korean…..Well, Probably.