Country diary: A tale of two oak trees | Paul Evans

The Marches, Shropshire: Our ancestors were captivated by how browsing by elk and bison affected tree growth. Now I am too by the human version - coppicingOn the lane that runs below Old Oswestry hillfort, an old oak draws me up a rise with a gate-leaning view across the Shropshire plain. Under the dark, kinked boughs of this English oak, Quercus robur, through a clearing sky, the Wrekin floats above mist on the far horizon. And floaty seems to capture the mood of this world, lifted from the weight of interminable rain - its air damp and vague, hazy around the earthworks of the hillfort that's echoed uncannily by its neighbouring iron-age settlement on the Wrekin far away; weirdly mysterious hidden histories of fields and woods are wrapped in the leaf buds overhead.Around this oak tree is a world that is as familiar as skin and, to use a phrase that is already overused these days, "uncharted territory". Next to this tree, poised above the steep holloway bank above the lane, is a coppiced oak. It's the same species and may be the same age or even older, but it has six trunks only half the size of its neighbour. These coppice stools, where the central trunk was cut down long ago, are places of wonder. This one has the decaying remains of a trunk cut centuries ago with dendrothelmata - water-filled cavities, a rare habitat now. Continue reading...