Clarence's Wisdom

Clarence yawned and shivered. The temperatures were starting to rise slowly, but there was still a chill in the air, particularly so early in the morning when the sun wasn’t up yet.

He shook his old bones and decided it was time to get cracking and start the preparation for this new season. He had been asleep for so long, he had shut most systems down to survive this cold winter and he needed to set his house in order ahead of the spring rush.

There is no time like the present, Clarence thought as he sent the signal marking the beginning of a new cycle through his body. First, he needed water, and a lot of it. He had used his sap as his own personal antifreeze for the past several months, by dehydrating it as much as possible and making it a rich sugar punch mix. In answer to his request, his roots started pumping water from the ground. The mycelium intermingling with his roots kept working in unison to bring him nutrients, just like it had done all winter. They were blessed to have such a lovely and caring community around these parts. Even those little humans played their part here, and he knew this wasn’t the case everywhere.

Clarence only had few days to get ready and catch the first wave of spring. You know what they say, ‘early bird catches the worm’. All his systems were rebooting and hopping into the pre-spring frenzy right away.

After few weeks of all this hard work, blooming got on its way. His flowers came first, hard to see, hidden that they were at the base of twigs and near emerging leaves. Following shortly, bright green leaves appeared, and yellow hanging catkins. As soon as those matured, they spent three days expelling all their pollen grains, which got carried by the wind, the birds and little six-legged friends to his nearby extended relatives. His own flowers got pollinated and his children started growing and forming pairs and clusters. There hadn’t been any surprise freezing at the onset of spring and Clarence had no doubt it was going to be a very fruitful season.

By summertime, he had a beautiful deep green canopy extending 13 feet in all direction. He had welcomed his lodgers’ second litters of the year, those little furry creatures running down his branches and up and down his trunk, fuzzy tail swinging, jiggety little feet tapping. This family had been with him for several seasons, and they already raised 6 litters in the little nook they called home, midway through his trunk. Their first litter had tickled him terribly while he was still sleeping, back in February, those little feet running all around. He just loved them, and he could not wait to have another generation of little squirrels running around, filled with the energy of youth. Just thinking of it made him smile.

Clarence had more lodgers of course. Some he knew well, some that were just passing. The smaller ones were the spiders and insects, and they always found little gaps and holes where to set up shop. The older he got the more of those nooks and crannies there were, but he was not ready to dwell on that just yet. Some of those tiny creatures made him quite itchy, but they were unfortunately necessary. If nothing else, they were an excellent snack for the hundreds of birds that came to rest and flirt on his branches.

In the morning, he usually saw those fearless and cheeky Red Robins, often accompanied by the more shy and gentle Yellow and Blue Tits. The Robins were usually the first to sing, marking the beginning of a new day. Their song was so melodic, all sing, sing and pause, sing, sing and pause. They were glorious little creatures. Clarence sighed, if only all the birds were as endearing and sweet. He had murmuration of rambunctious Starlings, stopping by several times a day and creating mayhem in their wake. Of course, Crows, and Blackbirds also came, and Pigeons. One could not throw an acorn and not hit a Pigeon! Some had even nested high up in his branches last season. But the couple he was the most hopeful about was the Red Kites. They had stopped by few times in his higher section, and he was hopeful they would come and choose to settle here. He was one of the oldest and largest oak trees around after all. Where else could they possibly go?

Clarence loved most of his visitors, but for one. He really did not care much for Magpies. Those were a noisy and nosey bunch, they were the gossiper of the woods, babbling incessantly. Oh, were those annoying! As a conventicle, they were mischief incarnated, and they were mean too! He wished they would go settle on another tree, but he had no such luck, and every year they came in greater numbers. Where were those humans when you needed them?!

He shivered with pleasure as the wind ruffled his little workers, making them giggle away. They were busy photosynthesizing so that he could grow stronger and store enough energy in his warehouses for next winter. They were an industrious bunch and he just loved them to bits, but he was sad at how short their lives were. They would only ever see this season and disappear while he had seen so many himself. He sighed. Such was the way of life, and he was going to make sure they had a good year by protecting them the best he could, particularly against winter moth larva. Did you know that those could eat 27,000 times their own weight in young oak leaves? Nasty little buggers, those were. But his workers need not worry, he had been around long enough that he knew which phenolics or tannins to produce to hinder such attacks.

Every year he also had few gall wasps laying their eggs on his leaves, but he didn’t really have a way around this. To be fair, he thought it was an acceptable loss, as humans collected some of those galls to make what they called “indelible ink”. Clever little things those humans. Of course, he had no idea what indelible ink meant, but that didn’t really matter. There were many things he didn’t understand those days. Things had changed too much and too fast, particularly in the past 100 years.

He was certainly a mature gentleman, at two hundred and two years, and signs of age were starting to appear. His trunk was getting fatter than it had been, particularly in his middle section, and he was starting to look a little gnarled in some places, but he still had few good years left in him!

As Clarence pondered about the signs of age, nostalgia got hold of him. He remembered being just a seedling when George IV became the King in 1820. It was a quieter time when he lived surrounded by his brethren. They were many then, and some had lived a long life. Unfortunately, many were cut down during the second world war as the deer park was transformed into farmed fields to provide food for the people. He remembered the bombs too, those terrible exploding devices destroying everything in their wake, dropping all around him. Clarence had survived all of it by sheer luck, many had not.

He had heard the stories passed along from old trees to young saplings though, about the time the Castle at the end of the road was built, by strange men called Normans, and about the hunting parties there used to be before the forest got reduced to what it is today. He had seen so much in his life too; the Industrial Revolution, the flying machines in the 1920s taking off barely a mile away on The Lawn, both wars, the 1972 and 1973 “People’s Free Festival” organised in the park by Ubi Dwyer and Sid Rawle. Oh, that last one had been such a raucous thing, with hundreds and hundreds of people showing up and walking all around. Thankfully, the park had become a haven again in the 1950s, when it turned into what it is today, a protected place for people and animals alike to enjoy.

Clarence had been lucky to set his roots in a prime estate site, at the top of Snow Hill, with the perfect view over the Long Walk and the Castle. He had been a very young tree when the humans erected the Copper Horse, representing George III. He heard some humans calling him the Mad King, and Clarence always wondered what this was all about. Anyhow, he was now standing tall and proud to the right of that statue, watching the world coming and going, surrounded by a big herd of deer running wild and by many friends.

That being said, the older he got and the smaller all the creatures around him seemed, including those little humans responsible for so much suffering of his people with their noise, steel and destruction. These days the water tasted funny and even foul at times, making some of the young trees look sickly. And the air! The air was just smelling funny and some days it was even plain nauseating. It must be all those cars and probably the hundreds of planes he saw flying high in their air above him, every day. Progress they called it. Not sure what that progress was, it just didn’t seem such a good thing to him. But then, he was only a tree, what would he know.

Clarence wondered what his ancestors would say if they were there. He wondered what he will say when it was his turn to be an ancient grumpy old tree, if he ever made it that is. He heard of the tale of an oak tree up North who was said to be a thousand years old, in a place called Manthorpe. Clarence thought this ought to be one strong oak to have survived so long. The oldest of his own ancestors had passed at the ripe age of 786, which was quite an honourable achievement for an oak.

The birds had brought tales from trees much older, some who had witnessed the rise of humanity. Those stories were not from the Oaks, whose life span was only seven centuries long or so, but from the Yews. Now those were the guardians of the tree wisdom. They could live for thousands of years. There were legends of at least two such trees, one further up North called Fortingall Yew, and the other to the West called St Cynog church Yew. They were both said to be at least 3,000 years old. They had witnessed the end of the Bronze Age, the Iron age, the coming of countless hordes of humans that they called Romans, Anglo-Saxons, or Vikings and so much more. So many events and so many lives! The things they must have been witnessed to, Clarence reflected thoughtfully.

But there was no dwelling on the past he thought, only the future and his part in it. His job was to make new trees who will grow strong and hopefully live for hundreds of years like him, and maybe longer.

He shook himself. Here we were again, toward the end of this cycle, the days growing shorter. The spiders were making their webs all around him. This was the mating season after all, and yet another sign it was time to start wrapping up.

Clarence thought it had been quite a good season, maybe not his best, but still a very good one indeed. He had put on 187 kg of new wood, created 483,405 leaves and 1857 acorns. He also released thousands of litres of oxygen in the process. You might think the number of children was a little over the top, but sadly only 1 in 10,000 would succeed. Some would become seedlings, then sapling and finally develop to become fully grown trees, but many would be eaten by little gluttons such as pigeons, ducks, pigs, deer, squirrels or even mice. Every time an acorn or a cluster fell off, he could hear their scream of joy as they started their journey, their adventure into the world. Each of them filled him with pride and hope. It broke his heart a little when one of his little squirrel friend or deer decided to snack on one of his children. But so was the way of life he thought. This was a tough life out there for his specie and it was exactly why his family always produced so many children every year.

As the day grew shorter, he knew it was getting close to the time where he had to release his workers and his children, for the next part of their journey. Around October time, his acorns started falling, covering the ground around him.

Shortly after, he produced the hormones which informed his leaves they had to start breaking their pigments down so that they could be stored as nutrient for winter. While this happened, his leaves slowly turned from their deep green to the autumnal colours of red, orange and yellow. Once the breakdown was complete, his courageous little workers slowly detached, helped by the wind, and simply floated away. The lucky ones caught a big gust of wind which kept them flying for a long time, up and down and back up again. Each falling one screamed of excitement and joy, and the others, still attached, cheered as they knew this was the beginning of their next mission to support life: breaking down and making the soil rich and fertile.

Clarence finally started his dehydration process, pulling most of the water out of his systems, ensuring his sugar rich sap was ready to save him from filling with ice during winter, while providing him the nutrients he needed to survive, with the help of his mycelium.

He looked at the world around him one last time, wondering what he would find when he woke up next time. He yawned and slowly slipped into a deep sleep.