Aljos Farjon, honorary research associate at RBG Kew, knows almost all there is to about conifers, which include the firs and spruces widely used as Christmas trees. When he had studied everything about them that he could, he turned his thoughts to another favourite topic: English oaks.
Aljos Farjon
I suppose it was a given that I’d take some kind of biological direction. I grew up in a small town in the Netherlands, where my brothers and I were very close to the outdoors. We had woods, heathland and lots of areas of water on our doorstep.
In a roundabout way, I ended up at the University of Utrecht. I supplemented the income from contracted research work there with drawings of conifers for a former professor. I published on this in academic journals, which helped me become known internationally.
In time, I came to work at Oxford, picking up a project on conifers in the neo-tropics – Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean islands – begun by Brian Styles. After this was published, I joined RBG Kew. For the rest of my time there, I published everything I could about conifers in a biological sense, including an atlas of the world’s conifers showing the natural distribution of all 600 species. The atlas drew from a database of 27,000 georeferenced specimens in herbaria around the world and has become helpful to researchers in many fields because it was vetted meticulously.
On retiring, I looked for a new research topic. Being less inclined to sit on a plane for 12 hours, I settled on the natural distribution of ancient English oaks. On average, an oak with a 6m circumference is 400 years old which is important because after 1600 oaks began to be planted. There are 4,700 oaks in England with a 6m circumference and nearly half occur in the footprint of medieval deer parks established by the Normans, who enjoyed venison and introduced fallow deer from southern Italy, which they had also conquered.
There are about 115 oaks that more than 9m in circumference, but we cannot know how old the oldest oaks are because they are hollow inside. The maximum age of the largest oaks is probably 800 or 900 years, not 1000. When you stand in front of one, you think, ‘We are in the time of King John. Magna Carta happened when this was a young tree’. You think of all the biodiversity associated these ancient trees, much of which is totally dependent on them and couldn’t exist anywhere else.
Ancient Oaks in the English Landscape by Aljos Farjon (Second edition, RBG Kew), £40.
Aljos’s favourite sites to visit
Sherwood Forest
Nottinghamshire
This is a royal forest that contains the Major Oak, the largest oak in Britain with a circumference of 11m. Parts of the forest can be a bit crowded, but it’s fairly easy to wander off the path to quieter spots. It is open all year round. visitsherwood.co.uk
Windsor Great Park
Berkshire
Richmond Park is a good place to start if you want to see oaks, but Windsor Great Park is more natural. It’s a very large area, but I recommend two places within it: Cranbourne Park and Bear’s Rails. Both are quieter and open all year. Tel: 01753 860222; windsorgreatpark.co.uk
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