Heart of oak

An 800-year-old oak tree (left) in Gloucestershire – that was saved after a power firm tried to cut it down – has been shortlisted for the Tree of the Year Awards, along with the Drunken Rowan in Cumbria

(above) and the Arbor Tree in Shropshire.

For a country that was once covered in ancient woodland and whose inhabitants over five millennia have mostly cut it down, we are understandably more sentimental than most about our remaining trees. The Woodland Trust now runs an annual national survey to find the country’s Tree of the Year. Past winners have included a majestic and lonely sycamore on Hadrian’s Wall. This year’s shortlist includes an elderly oak, a sapling in the reign of Henry II, which has survived an 80-year fight against the efforts of a power company to chop it down, and a mulberry tree in the Hampstead garden where Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale. Most poignant, in the 100th year after the end of the First World War, is a horse chestnut grown from a conker brought from Verdun, life plucked from a field of carnage.