The oak with no name - Amanda Tuke
Long-listed written pieces of 250 words or under submitted to the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition on the theme of “trees close to you”
The oak with no name
“Nah, not that way. Ya creps’ll get mashed!” The young woman emerges through a gate into the wood. She’s wearing light-coloured trousers and white trainers. Leaning over the garden fence her companion calls out entertaining rather than helpful instructions.
The explorer picks her way across the mud, through brambles and cow parsley, towards the tree I’m standing under. I smile winsomely as she passes. She looks at my wellies and then away, with an eye roll I’m so familiar with. My request for sisterhood was presumptuous.
Above my head your heavy limbs writhe across the path. Your ample hips sway. Your heft inspires stubborn determination and, like the feisty explorer, I claim this suburban woodland. Spa Oak? Beulah Oak? Matriarch of the Great North Wood, you deserve a weighty moniker for everything you’ve done.
Under the oak with no name I poke about in the last year’s leaves and find a knobbly anomaly of an acorn. This extraordinary thing was genetically engineered by a tiny knopper gall wasp to create a perfect nursery. Over the centuries of this tree’s lifetime she’s been thwarted by generations of wasps, and squirrels, and the rest, and still fights on for a future for her young.
Sisters! Mothers! Daughters! Come out, come out, women of the woods and commons. Nothing’s going to stop me poking about under trees on my own. I look up. The young woman in the garden is still watching. Mad old bag, she’s probably thinking.
Birder and botanist Amanda Tuke @suburbanwilduk is based in the wilds of suburban south London and is currently Great North Wood nature-writer-in-residence funded by @ace_national
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