Storms, like sorrows, come not single spies these days, but in battalions. Or at least, that was my impression from listening to the news. So between the exit of Dudley and the entrance of Eunice I hurried out to check on some vulnerable old trees.
Cycling towards Chatsworth, I noticed a few middle-aged oaks in the adjacent fields. The clean trunk of one mighty specimen would, quarter-sawn, make a floor in the duke’s house. Two narrower stems were 10 metres apart, but their vast crowns met in the air, each matched against the other in form and volume so that the dome of bare branches seemed to spring from a single source.
Yet, while these oaks were grand, those I really wanted to see were much older, a last fragment of a medieval forest that once surrounded the house. And since this corner of Chatsworth is off limits to casual visitors, I leaned my bike against the estate wall where I could look over at these fading giants.
Ancient oaks defy our expectations. Like people in extreme old age, they become wholly idiosyncratic, with deficiencies and disfigurements that make each a character unlike any of its neighbours. And much more than people, each tree is its own ecosystem, with its own assemblage of lichens and fungi, each supporting scores of different species of moths and other invertebrates, gathering genetic mutations as it ages, a sort of wisdom that preserves each tree from the pests and pathogens that have threatened it through the centuries. They really do contain multitudes.
One oak in particular caught my eye, its trunk immensely fat but crowned with just a few sparse branches; all it could hold with life ebbing from it, like a slow tide. I spotted a large hole and realised I could see right through its bulk to the hillside beyond. The Dutch botanist Aljos Farjon measured the girth of these trees and found one at over seven metres, meaning they are likely to have germinated in the 15th century. Sobering to think they were already mature when Mary, Queen of Scots saw them during her detention here, a thousand thousand storms ago.
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