An Oak in Sherwood

We call for lunch at the craft centre in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, on the way home.

This old tree isn't, as I'd assumed at first sight, a sweet chestnut, it's one of the old oaks that you pass on your way from the visitor centre to the Major Oak - the biggest tree in Sherwood Forest, estimated to be more than a thousand years old.

Nettle, willowherb, cleavers, bracken and bramble grow on the forest floor with silver birch, rowan and yew as an understorey to the great oak. The oak may be ancient but the leaves are fresh: a green looper caterpillar lowers itself down from the tree canopy, where it has been munching leaves, on a silken thread.

A blackbird sings, jackdaws call and we hear a thin, clear, short song which we assume to be a whitethroat.

There's some recycling going on; silver birch colonises open ground but acts as a nurse crop for oak and other trees. As these come to maturity and shade out the birch this bracket fungus, shaped like the hoof of a carthorse, attacks their slender trunks.

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk