There's always some disaster in the news. If it's not the weather it's the threat of some new disease which may even be written of as "baffling" scientists or specialists. As with humans and their ills, so with trees. In one case it was no simple scare, elms just died out, though Jack Whaley has read that there is hope of revival in England. The latest bad news is from France, where oaks are under threat, some in fact already finished.
Strong as an oak, is, apparently a common phrase in French. From now on there will be a question mark over it, writes Frederic Lewing in the magazine Le Point. Foliage is growing thin on the trees, more and more branches are going rotten. Sessile oaks (that's our national tree, by decree of a few years ago), pedunculate oaks, the ones where the acorns hang on stalks, and even evergreen oaks, dark in foliage and huge in size in so many parks and big estates in this country, are affected. Further, the article asserts that this decline has been going on since 1992.
Fist noticed in Alsace and Lorraine; hundreds of hectares of trees have been seriously damaged in the Moselle area, losing from 60 per cent of their leaves to 100 per cent. And away over westward in the Vienne and Maine-et-Loire. Mind you, an official of the French Ministry of Agriculture is somewhat philosophical. Crises like these, he says, coincide with exceptional climatic events. The oaks are now feeling the brunt of the droughts of 1989 and 1990-1991. the trees are weakened and thus the king of the forest becomes the victim of devastating insects, opportunists all.
Most dangerous are the caterpillars, the chenille processionnaire. Apart from its defoliant purpose, it is harmful to people: its hairs, falling on passers-by, even, causes itching and rashes. Nasty. Then there's the leafroller moth, but it does its business early in the year and the tree may releaf.
There are other insect enemies but what the French foresters fear above all others is the fungus of Oak Wilt from America which could be deadly to Europe's oaks.
It could arrive on imported timber. It could be as calamitous as elm disease. And, presumably, that would apply to our oaks. The heading to the article is: "The King is Dying".
Y