How I made friends with a great oak tree named Quercus

I am 15 years old when I meet my special friend. I leave my concrete suburb, overflowing with a rage that longs to be soothed, but I don’t know how. My bike is my outlet, my escape route, and I ride to the
Rambouillet forest near Paris.

After many kilometres, the chain on my bike comes off next to a majestic oak. The tree becomes Quercus: a friend, a confidant, a reason to be in the world. I lean against him and calm washes over me. From then on, I come to visit him as often as life allows.

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As I keep returning to him, through the shape of his canopy, guided by the way each branch winds its way towards the precious light, I begin to glimpse the story he tells me. I slowly come to know him, not just in his simplest form as a great oak but also as a powerful being whose existence extends beyond human time. I start to wonder about his deeper nature, about what makes him so precious to me.

After two or three years of visiting him, I am overtaken by a deep conviction that he holds an extraordinary force specific to this tree. At the same time, I realise that external events could threaten his very existence. The care I give him starts to feel like a vocation, and the teenager I am has but one ambition: to know forests by becoming a forester, and in doing so, find the means and opportunity to protect Quercus.

Now as I lift my eyes toward the canopy, hearing the birdsong all around us, I sense the intricate web of interactions that governs this place – the drumming of a woodpecker on a dead branch, the melodious warble of a robin announcing its aliveness to the forest – I notice a sunbeam piercing the foliage of other oaks in this forest sanctuary and see the insects flying through it.

Through the brambles lining the path to Quercus, and the ferns and Scots pines I must pass to reach him, I find clues that, as the scientist I’ve become, illuminate the story this site holds and the events that once took place here. I trace time backwards, trying to piece together the history of my friend.

It is a few years before the French Revolution of 1789 when an oak in the Rambouillet forest begins to produce an abundance of acorns. They fall onto heathland dotted with only a few large trees, where villagers bring their pigs to fatten them before winter. Most of the seeds are eaten. 

Quercus is still just an acorn when a field mouse grabs him, hoping to eat in peace, hidden from large animals in the heart of a bramble patch. But the rodent forgets him, and Quercus takes root, protected from herbivores by the bramble’s thorns. With help from an unlikely ally – a fungus whose filaments bond with his roots and stretch through the soil to fetch every last mineral and the vital liquid that is water – Quercus begins to grow into a young oak full of promise.

But he must face many enemies of the tree world, like the caterpillar of the green oak tortrix, which hatches just as the oak’s spring leaves emerge, or the wasp whose larva diverts some of his sap to feed itself, wrapped in a protective gall that Quercus forms, to his own detriment.

Read more:

• The flowers are listening – so we’d better start talking sense
• Why everyone should have a favourite tree
• What we can learn from the eerie and mysterious worlds we leave behind

As I outline in my book Being an Oak: Life as a Tree a young oak still at the early stages of an arboreal life he must also contend with competition from a potentially unwelcome neighbour: a beech tree, eager for the same precious sunlight. To compete, he must reach ever higher, which explains why he has become the tallest tree in this forest sanctuary today.

At nearly 100 years old, he narrowly escapes disaster when a farmer, meaning to rejuvenate his pastures, lets a fire slip out of control. The forest burns for days, leaving a desolate landscape. Foresters try to erase the scars by planting pines, the only trees able to survive in the now-barren, sandy soil near Quercus’s sanctuary.

They think ahead, imagining future foresters replacing these conifers with broadleaved trees in a century’s time, once the pine needles have reestablished a forest floor. But human history, and the recurrence of war, decides otherwise.

In a paradox of human progress, modernity and its mechanical benefits bring into the forest tools of destruction: the chainsaw and the forestry tractor replace the axe and oxen once used to harvest trees. Yet they also present a new opportunity: to let trees grow larger now it’s no longer so hard to extract them. 

This ageing process creates new opportunities – taken up by birds, insects and bats – allowing the forest to reach an ecological balance that nourishes me every time I visit Quercus. It fuels animated conversations with him about the nature of this sanctuary and strengthens my calling as
a forester.

Being an Oak: Life as a Tree by Laurent Tillon, translated by Jessica Moore is out now (Bonnier, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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