Thank you, Simon
The Newborn Forest, or Merry Christmas
A Verdun oak forest was born a few years ago, not far from Epsom in Surrey. For now, it resembles a weed-covered wasteland dotted with rows of plastic tubes. Yet it is a forest, not a park, not a garden, and not a wood plantation. It was envisioned as a proper oak woodland, where oaks will root and be the stem supporting a diversity of species, layers, clearings, hollows, and forest edges.
If you look closely, you’ll see that each of those tubes shelters a young sapling. The fast-growing trees have already stretched to a few meters, while many are still small, barely visible above the tall grass. Oaks are not to be hurried. A couple of centuries will pass; the saplings will mature, while lineages of wild cherry, hazel, chestnut, ash, and beech shall come and go around them. That’s why the trees sprouting from the tubes are all different and planted so densely that it’s difficult to walk between them. The young oaks are still almost invisible and sparsely planted because oaks need space. This is indeed a forest, just a very young one—like a newborn child who hasn’t yet learned to grab a toy. For oaks, the years pass like weeks or even days for us.
The name “Verdun oak” is no scientific label. Common sessile oak it is, if we speak for science and its nomenclature, which has been growing across much of Western Europe for tens of thousands of years ever since the last glacier retreated back to its shrunken dominion at the pole. Nor is it a geographic name—Verdun, in northern France, is a five-day walk from here. The oak’s name is historical, both frightening and hopeful, fitting for Christmas Eve.
The town of Verdun is remembered for its horrific, agonizingly long, and almost meaningless battle during World War I. Although the Germans lost, the French and their allies paid such a price that the outcome could hardly be called a victory. In 1916, the two sides clashed with every weapon they had: artillery, machine guns, gas, and flamethrowers. Over a year of hell, 300,000 people dead, and twice as many maimed.
The Verdun oak forest, which once crowned the French soil, became a moonlike landscape of craters, ditches, puddles, and charred oak carcasses jutting out of the ground toward the sky like burned, dead man’s fingers.
Only charred stumps of the oak forest surrounding Verdun remained, jutting out of bomb-cratered mud. Even those were often fake—pieces of trunks disguised as hidden observation towers, as there was nowhere else to hide and watch the enemy.
Volks tell the story of one British soldier who survived Verdun and returned home with an acorn in his pocket. He planted it in 1919 in memory of his fallen comrades. That was how the first of the last Verdun oaks grew. Later on, either from other soldiers’ acorns or France’s memorial donation of saplings and acorns, the oaks grew in numbers across the UK.
One of them grew up in Kew Gardens, but sadly, it was felled by the St. Jude storm in October 2013. Though the tree appeared mature, its roughly 100 years of life were still a young beginning by oak standards—like most of the soldiers who perished at Verdun. Fortunately, the gardeners at Kew—who are something of magicians—managed to preserve a branch from that tree and grow it into a sapling now planted at the same spot near the Palm House behind the Chinese lions. I should visit it someday and say hello to the second Verdun oak at Kew, which grows on the hillside near the Rotunda, on my way to work.
The newborn forest near Epsom—Langley Vale Centenary Wood—is a memorial to the battle of Verdun, its futility, death, and scar on Mother Earth. Here, no one is forgotten, and each tree is planted in memory of each life lost.
Long ago, perhaps a thousand years back, this hilly plain south of London was covered in primeval oak and beech forest. By the 13th century, however, it became farmland, and by the 18th, merely arable fields with almost no traces of woodland. When World War I began, the valley became a training ground for British troops heading to the continent. Here, soldiers learned not just to shoot and march but also to freeze to death while waiting for their superiors, dig trenches, and use and survive gas.
In 2014, the Woodland Trust purchased the entire area, including not only the fields where the camps once stood but also small remnants of ancient trees that had survived deforestation, with the intent to restore them in memory of that first war, remembered for all the wrong reasons. Among the 180,000 trees already planted there are second-generation Verdun oaks, grown from the acorns of those planted by veterans a century ago.
In addition to Verdun, the forest will commemorate many land battles and the equally terrifying but brief Battle of Jutland at sea. Despite securing a victory and a blockade of the German north coast, the British bore scarring losses. HMS Queen Mary, Invincible, and Indefatigable all sank to the bottom of the sea, and 6,000 souls remained on the decks of their gallant warriors.
Sadly, we can’t imagine what the oak forest near Epsom will look like when it comes of age. In three centuries, the climate will be warmer and wetter—a good thing for sessile oaks, which also favor hills. I believe their hollows will have enough room, and the now rare bats of Surrey won’t suffer too much from the abundance of our beloved London parakeets. Local foresters claim that even now, the area is home to many birds, animals, and rare plants. All we saw when visiting, though, was the dramatic flight of a pheasant: its bright plumage striking even in the dim rays of a December sunset.
Despite the weeds and rows of plastic tubes, the newborn forest is a place both magical and right, especially at Christmas. Remembrance and Hope are inscribed on the main bench at Kew, made from our fallen Verdun oak. I hope that through the memory of millions of lost lives, we will also remember the forest and tell its story to our children.
Kew, December 2024
