Aljos Farjon
After learning almost everything there is to learn about conifers, botanist Aljos Farjon has turned his attention to the English oak
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 with woods, heathland and water on our doorstep. My brothers and I always spent a lot of time in the outdoors.
I ended up at the University of Utrecht and supplemented my income from contracted research work there by making drawings of conifers for a former professor. Publishing on this subject in academic journals helped me become known internationally.
In time I came to work at Oxford, picking up a project on conifers in the neotropics – Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean islands – begun by Dr Brian Styles. After this was published, I joined RBG Kew. During 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 600plus 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.
On retiring, I began to look 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 it was after 1600 that oaks began to be planted here. There are 4,700 oaks in England with a 6m circumference, and nearly half of them occur in the footprint of medieval deer parks established by the Normans, who enjoyed venison and introduced fallow deer from southern Italy.
There are about 115 oaks greater 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 1,000. 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 with 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) is on sale now, RRP £40.