To a meeting at the House of Lords (The River Room; glorious views) to launch Action Oak Initiative. All the senior tree people were there, from the heads of the Forestry Commission, Woodland Trust and Woodland Heritage to Tony Kirkham from Kew and Nicola Spence, the Chief Plant Health Officer at DEFRA. All are worried about the manifest increase of health problems in oaks, from the gradual dieback that gives us ‘stag-headed’ trees to acute oak decline, when weeping lesions in the bark lead to rapid death. One way or other our native oaks are in poor shape. Taken with the disease hitting our ashes (the commonest of all our trees) the outlook is alarming.
Much was made of the status of the oak as our national tree, the symbol of everything robust and enduring about Britain. You could almost hear Land of Hope and Glory in the background. There was a tour afterwards to see the roof of Westminster Hall, built of Hampshire oaks 700 years ago. Then there is HMS Victory. What could be more symbolic of England?
I felt constrained to point out that we are not the only country with oaks. France has far more (and grows them far better). German forestry is in advance of ours in many ways. Far from being a British problem, oak decline (and for that matter all plant diseases) are international. The first essential is to pool our knowledge and research with plant scientists everywhere.
