A Day In The Life Of An Oak Tree

Max's Walden is surrounded by hundreds of Oak trees instilling more serenity into this body which was  already filled with 13 plus years of tranquil life with Max. 

It's a beautiful sight to look at them any time and any day of the year. 

This beauty comes from a symbiosis between the Oak tree and the thousands of other living beings around it. 

It's been a privilege and gift to live and breath here. 

I cannot ask for more. 

 John Lewis-Stempel observes this beauty over the course of an entire day: 

7.01am

The slanting rays of morning sun first catch the 1,000 leaf buds in the canopy, then the high untidy drey of the grey squirrel, before illuminating the ground beneath our 300-year-old oak. There, as Robert Bridges versed it: ‘Thick on the woodland floor Gay company shall be,/Primrose and Hyacinth And frail Anemone.’ Hyacinth here is the bluebell, lying in a mauve pool.

The leaves of autumn, brought down by the screaming Halloween wind, still lie around the tree in a thick sodden copper mat; the mould is soft on the pads of the returning vixen as she slinks down into her den among the tree’s roots, a rabbit clamped in her jaws from her night prowl. A present for her cubs.

In the brightening of the day, the birds and animals that have roosted in the tree emerge from their lairs; the pipistrelle bats from a hollow branch, the wren from under the ivy crawling up the immense trunk. Early morning is the great feeding time of diurnal birds and to the oak fly a great spotted woodpecker, nuthatch and a treecreeper. The latter climbs our venerable Quercus robur in a spiral, inspecting the multitudinous cracks in the bark of trunk and limbs for insects; she is immediately lucky and a Clubiona brevipes spider, which has overwintered under the tree’s rough, hard skin, falls victim to her tweezer-precise bill. The fissures of the oak are, quite literally, crawling with creepy-crawlies; in total, 1,178 invertebrate species use it and 257 of them rely solely on this tree.