The Bulby oak

The Bulby oak, silhouetted against a darkening sky on a January morning

The wayside trees that can be found around Bourne tell a story of the changing face of our countryside and a perfect example of this can be seen on a country road near Bulby, five miles north west of Bourne. Here you will find an old oak tree growing in the hedgerow, and as every picture tells a story, so does every tree and this was told by the Woodland Trust who interpreted the photograph: 

This is a very nice picture of a pedunculate oak which has become stag headed, either due to age, changes in the water table and/or root damage due to ploughing in the adjacent field and/or ground works associated with road. The former is a natural process of retrenchment from which oaks re-grow and is a strategy for long life. The tree is already starting to form a new crown and has copious growth of epicormic shoots arising from the trunk. In all likelihood it could have the ability to grow for many hundreds of years to come if people do not react to the sight of deadwood and chop it down unnecessarily for tree safety reasons. If left to its own devices it will form a new crown and then retrench once more and continue to cycle in this way. 

It is quite amazing that such a mine of information should be available from one picture and prompts us to think that perhaps we should all start taking a much closer interest in the trees around us. Britain's ancient forests once stretched from coast to coast but today woodland cover in the United Kingdom is only 10% of the total land area, compared to France which has 27% and Morocco which has 19%. In the last fifty years, more than half of Britain's ancient woodland has been lost because of storms, disease, development and neglect and so the planting of new trees is of increasing importance. 

The Bulby oak photographed the following summer

Wayside trees can also be found in many other places around Bourne where land has been cleared over the centuries for intensive farming, leaving them at the field's edge and alongside drainage ditches. There are several fine examples on the A151 on the way to Edenham village, north west of Bourne, where the road is lined with oaks whose ancient trunks are covered with ivy and whose canopy envelops the road in shade as summer progresses.