The King of Limbs (and other 1000yr old Oaks)

So today's video we come to a little forest, Savernak Forest, near where I grew up. And this is an ancient woodland that has the highest concentration of ancient trees in Europe. And I want to show you some oak trees like you maybe have never seen before. So I had an amazing thousand kilometer drive all the way from Denmark through Europe to the UK and actually drove all the way up to Oxton's during the night without sleep. So bit of a crazy adventure. Having a few days rest with grace now just to get my energy back before heading off to Ireland. I think you'll agree this amazing farms I've been visiting, it's such a privilege and a pleasure to go and check out what people are getting started with and carrying on with as well. But I've really enjoyed the process and I think a lot of you have too. So I'm really glad that that's been beneficial for us all. And yeah, we're just going on a few days trip around the south of England. We might do a bit of fly fishing and get to the coast later. But this is a very special place for me to come here. There are about eight or nine oak trees that are over a thousand years old and I guess most people have never seen oak trees like that. And I want to show you a few of them as we take a walk in the forest and just really yeah, it's awe inspiring place. And to come to ancient woodlands, it's something that's very special indeed. To observe the ecology and understand like what these woodlands would have looked like in history. Some of these oak trees have been here since before England was actually a country. So let's go and have a look at a few.

Ew, Daddy.

So this is the. What's that? Oh it's an animal bone. It's a leg of a deer. That's strange. This is the Crockmore Oak.

Hey look, acorns.

Let's take some acorns from this one. This is a thousand years old. Just have a look at this tree.

And it still produces acorns, which is actually really, really cool.

I think we should take some acorns from some of the most special trees and we'll propagate them at our farm. There's a whole mycelial ecology in here and a whole load of rocks.

Who would put that leg up there?

Wow, just look at this thing.

You should show the leg, daddy.

This is not the oldest by any means, but it's certainly an old tree. What do you think Gracie?

Old.

Pretty impressive now, pretty big But I.

Don'T think a car could fit.

You stand next to the trunk and let's get a scale with you on it. Pretty big. But we're about to see an even bigger, more famous tree. The King of Limbs. There it is, Gracie. This is King of Limbs. Now this is one of the most famous trees here. Obviously King of Limbs was the album of Radiohead that was recorded in a state manor here. But this tree has lost a lot of its limbs, each of them being big enough to be independent trees. But Grace, come and look around here.

You told me to look in here.

It's totally hollow, but you can come in round this side.

Yeah, there's lots of mushrooms here. That's actually kind of a good home.

This tree is 11 meters around. Have you ever seen such a big oak tree?

It's really cool. Mushrooms and you could actually live here.

So King of Limbs is a particularly special tree. In fact, there's a whole ecology that takes place inside ancient hollow trees. It's a place where bats come to live and bats are therefore sleeping inside the hollowed out tree and dropping high phosphate manure right inside the tree where it actually wants it. So there's this entire ecology that exists in ancient trees like this. Now this tree is over a thousand years old. It's older than England. England became a state in nine. You're doing history, you should know.

No, I'm not.

I think 927 England became a state. So this tree actually predates that. Pretty amazing. When I first came here it had a few more branches. They're falling off now as it gets old, but it's still pretty impressive thing. It's 11 meters around and this was actually a forest where King Henry VIII hunted and he actually met his third wife here, Jane Seymour, whose father owned this land and estate and they stayed at Wolf House on the estate. And this tree must have seen a lot of people coming by on horses and romantic tales of people in the forest. And it's quite amazing to imagine something this old. No. So obviously the tree is only growing on the outer sides where the phloems and xylems are. So this is basically fossilized wood. We're right in the middle of the heart of the tree. This is a thousand year old material. It's turned into dust now, but pretty incredible. I don't know if this will come out on camera. There's a bit of honey fungus on here now. But looking up into the middle of this, I mean this wood looks burnt almost. I mean it's just so old, it's falling apart. Such an incredible thing to be in the middle of such an old organism. Now, Gracie's actually missing school, but I think we're learning a lot about ecology and history. More than I'd learn in school, I think so. Because look where we are right now. We are on a Roman road.

What, this was the Roman road?

Yeah.

Oh, cool.

This is a 2000 year old road. The Romans were incredibly good road builders and they built incredibly straight roads that crisscrossed our country. Now all that remains is a ditch. The earthworks are still in place. This is why in design, I always talk about how changing the shape of the land is very high risk. Not only is it high cost, but if you change the shape of the earth around, it'll be like that in a couple of thousand years time. So you better know what you're doing. But this is the remnants of ancient history and rather than studying it in school, we're walking on it, feeling it, touching it, finding wild mushrooms, learning about ecology and clearing the debris out the forest. Pretty cool. Now, there's much better preserved examples across the UK of Roman history, including, like these. These roads would have all been cobbled for really fast access around the country. With chariots, horse and chariots. There are some remaining actual cobbled streets as well as amazing mosaics and yeah, pretty cool. Gracie, check out this tree. This beach is decimated on the inside. It's still alive, obviously, the trees, alive on the outer reaches of the bark on the phloems supplying water up there, but it's totally hollow inside and totally decayed. Pretty amazing. Amazing old beech trees here. You can't really see the scale of them, but these are huge old trees. I really miss the beech forest. Beautiful. So here we are at the Pointing Oak.

I'm not so sure I'll find anything here.

There's a huge limb that's come up here. We should look for acorns. Grace, we should look for acorns. Look at the size of this limb that fell off. Wow.

What fell off?

It's an old, old tree.

A little mushroom down there.

There's some polypore mushrooms here.

Here's a mushroom. Or maybe not. Those are so cool. Are they edible? Are those edible?

No.

Can you touch them? Will they die? Will you die?

I doubt it. So it's lost half of its main limbs, but still very impressive. Well, I was lucky enough to grow up in this area and so I've been here many times, but I really recommend it as a place to come if you're ever in the uk, it's a beautiful place to go for long walks and you can camp here. We camped in the campsite last night. But it's. It's rare to find such ancient woodland assemblies. And whilst there's these icon thousand year old trees and many of them, there's a lot of very old trees. And it's interesting to just come and observe the forest structure and really look at the ecology that's taking place here. There's obviously it's a big estate that owns this, so there's also some planted forests, but there's nowhere really in Europe where you'll find such a concentration of old oak and also chestnut and beech. Really old beeches. It's remarkable. The camera can never take it all in when you're looking at architectural things this size. But we're off now to find the queen of the forest. We've seen the king of limbs, now we want to find the queen. This is spider oak. But look, Gracie, how much of the tree has disappeared. That means half the tree. Wow. This is another thousand year old elk. What do you think, Gracie?

Doesn't look like a thousand year old.

It does to me. Look how big the trunk is.

How long round.

I would say it's at least 6 meters, probably more.

The other one was 12 meters.

Yeah, that's a particularly big one. Wow. Amazing. You can see why it's called spider oak. Look, if you look back now, it's legs. Wow. This is an ancient birch tree, but this behind the tall one is a chestnut. Sweet chestnut. Beautiful old tree. But we're now right up here close to the queen oak.

Why is it called queen oak?

Look at this chestnut, Gracie. Wow. This place is incredible. Look at that for a chestnut. Unbelievable. That's. That's got to be of a similar age group. Not. It's not horse chestnut. Sweet chestnut. You can see them up there. Wow. That's amazing. This is the queen oak. It goes with the king of limbs. Now this tree is very old and very decayed. I mean, look at this. There's barely anything left alive. You can get inside that one basically and see up inside, But it's still going on. Stubborn old monarch. We've just been thinking, Grace and I, because your mother Michelle wanted. Well, you suggested that you wanted to start earning your own money. Didn't I?

Wanted to get my own money. And then my mum said I should start my own business.

Yeah. Michelle says that Grace should start her own business already. So one of our missions was to think of a little idea on this few days that we have away and we've come up with a good idea. Mummy said she'd give you something to start the business.

£20.

£20.

And with that £20, I'll buy as many stamps and envelopes as I can.

Stamps and envelopes. Okay, so this is the plan, right? We're at some of the most amazing old trees in Europe, let alone England. So what Grace has decided to do, which I think is an amazing idea, I'm going to be your customer. She's going to gather together acorns from some of the oldest trees in Europe, this king of limbs being the. The most notable one. And. But we will gather acorns now. And then what will happen? People can.

They can buy them.

You're going to send five at a time?

Five at a time. Five pounds. And I'll save one pound from each. Each person. And then I can do that towards more stamps and envelopes.

That's a good idea. So you reinvest some of the money into your supplies and your fixed costs. Well, I think it's really cool.

So many here.

Well, there are. We have to search for them. They're dropping acorns. It's the perfect time to do this. So, Grace, you're offering anyone anywhere in the world, if you want five acorns from the oldest oak trees in Europe, I think we'll collect some from here, some from the Crockmore Oak, and there's quite. There's about eight more. You'll handwrite the envelopes and send five acorns with which tree they came from to anyone anywhere.

But the thing is, I don't know if I'll be able to get with which tree it is. It might be a mistake.

No, no, I'll help you with that. We'll make a bag for each. And if you send me five pounds, I will let Grace know your address and then she will send you an envelope and write it out by hand and post it to you wherever you live. With five acorns from ancient, incredible tree. And that way we can spread out the genetics of this tree potentially all over the globe. That's amazing. So we can't guarantee the viability of these acorns, but Grace is finding ones that don't have holes in, that aren't rotten, and she's doing her best. So we can't guarantee that they will germinate, and you need to read up on the stratification and germination of oaks, but that's easy enough. But I think they're pretty Easy to propagate. But Grace is doing her best to select good ones all around. And we'll label each tree that we come by and give you its approximate age as well.

But I think it should also be like you can get a mix of them if you want.

Okay, so maybe we'll send them one of five different trees. Okay, we'll do the bonus pack. So this is actually sessile oak, Quercus petraea. It's also known as Cornish oak in our country. And it's called that because the acorns are actually directly on the branch. They don't have a stem or a peduncle like you see on the peduncular oaks. So that's common throughout England, also Europe, all the way Anatolia, Iran, basically. It's quite widespread. We're finding some nice acorns for Gracie's startup, which I'm really excited about. I think she's such a creative brain just to come up with these kind of things. And she's been doing this sort of thing before, like a little bit selling cakes. And I think we've got an entrepreneur in the making, which is awesome. Can you imagine, Grace, if people germinate these in America and all different places? Can you imagine when you're an old lady seeing photos of these old trees that you've sent out by envelope when you were a little girl? Is that exciting?

Yeah, but I don't know if they'll germinate.

Yeah, that's okay. There's no guarantee.

Some brown, some green, some green, yellow, some green and brown.

You don't, you can't guarantee to people. You're a bit worried about that, but that's okay. You've made it clear. But I think just to hold an acorn from a thousand year old tree will be a marvel for some people. But probably a lot of them will germinate. That would be amazing. People could send you photos, couldn't they? Grace is a bit worried about whether the acorns will sprout and we obviously can't guarantee that. We're just coming today to have a little look. But what we can guarantee is where the acorns come from because the specimen old trees are actually surrounded by typically beech or spruce or whatever. In the more modern forest, there's patches of ancient beech and ancient oak. So we can guarantee the acorns we're sending are from these particular trees. That's a really cool idea. I'm super impressed with Gracie and just a quick creative process she went through to come up with this just as we're walking along. It's like, it's totally her idea and I'm totally up for supporting it because I think it's the sort of thing where you folks that are following my channel and watching what we do, it's such an easy way to empower a young woman to start. You know, this is the sort of experience I see that could really impact her life and send it in a different direction. In a small way, perhaps, but, you know, she'll never forget, like a response from people all over and having to do basic accounts and write envelopes and post them off and take responsibility for it. It's very cool. I'm very excited about it and it's a lovely way to engage together through this channel, actually. I think it's a really, you know, it's way out of the scope of what she could do, just baking cookies and going down the street or us as parents, like, paying her to do something. It's like. It's really of a broader scope in a way that I think will empower her a lot. So she's just off busy trying to find really good acorns for you, which is awesome. We've actually decided we're doing mixed acorns. So you get some from the Queen of the Forest, the King of Limbs, and some of the other ancient trees. Just because I think that's a neat way to do it. It's very limited edition, so there aren't many sets for Grace to send out. But do support her if you feel moved to. And it's amazing to just spread some of these acorns around because it's such an amazing lineage to propagate. I hope some of you managed to propagate them. We'd love to hear from you if you do. That would be awesome to map them out.

Thank you for supporting my first business and I'm really excited.