Blogs

This year I harvested acorns in Grigadale Arboretum rather late in the season (April), at a stage when most species had dropped them. As trees are planted quite close together, in some cases I had to distinguish acorns based on their shape in order to collect from a particular tree rather than its neighbor. When it came to Quercus ×kewensis, there was a mass of acorns on the ground, many from several neighboring Q. cerris. I found that I could pick out the Q. ×kewensis because of their odd shape. 

Last April I briefly visited Canberra, the capital of Australia. I was able to take a day off to look at trees and spent most of it admiring the impressive collections of Australian native flora at the Australian National Botanic Gardens. This was my first trip to Australia and I had been looking forward to the diversity of its endemic trees. But Canberra also offered a quite unexpected treat: several Californian oaks used in well-maintained plantings along residential streets.

Over the first hundred days of 2018 I have read Dante’s Divine Comedy, as part of a mass-reading organized on Twitter by Pablo Maurette, an Argentine Literature Professor and author at the University of Chicago. Thousands of readers spread across the globe read one canto per day of the classic poem, and exchanged comments and engaged in debates under the hashtag #Dante2018. Oaks are not absent...

This year I have received an unprecedented demand for oaks. This is exhilarating and exciting. One client bought 15 Quercus lobata. Another took about 50 oaks to Ireland. Another from Italy enquired for 120 different oaks in twos and threes. An enquiry for 60 oaks has just come in. It is very encouraging that oaks are becoming so important and that they are wanted in small quantities and large.