How to Build a Thousand-Year-Old Tree

Credits Matthew Ponsford is a London-based writer and researcher. Even in early summer, when Sherwood Forest is thick with lime-colored new leaves, you start to see it from a few hundred paces away. Its trunk is 36 feet around and its canopy stretches for almost three bus-lengths. Its broad, bowl-shaped crown is propped up by a ring of metal columns, like walking sticks measured to fit each of its groaning boughs. The Major Oak, as it’s called, is surrounded by a fence that keeps its many visitors from tramping too close. On the summer day I visited, Reg Harris, a 50-something arborist in thick utility trousers and a sun-bleached polo, invited me to hop over and stand for a while at the foot of the giant tree. The Major, Harris told me, sprouted from an acorn here at least eight centuries ago. No one knows exactly when. Some estimate it has seen the arrival of a thousand summers. It’s shorter than it once was, Harris said; the tree would have reached its peak height sometime around C ... Read full article.