I bear their homes, too
| Links to the story | Key Stage 2 and 3 programmes of study | Possible learning outcomes | Big ideas |
| I bear their homes, too | describe how living things are classified into broad groups according to common observable characteristics Year 6 programme of study for Science | Recognise that leaf characteristics are used to identify the English oak | adventures in time and space being and becoming folklore life depend depends on life summer stories time travellers to nowhere what is life? |
A note on oaks
There are two common species of oak in the South of England, that are easily confused.
The English oak is Quercus robur. It is also called the pedunculate oak or common oak. It has its distinctive round-lobed leaves and short leaf stalks. Its acorns have long stalks.
In contrast, the sessile oak, Quercus petraea, has long leaf stalks and acorns born on short stalks.
To complicate things further, the two species often hybridise and many intermediate forms exist.
Our oak tree is definitely Q. robur, which explains why our old timer is so proud of his English roots!
A note on the story
It has taken a while to write this story- imagining what an oak tree might say to a traveller who passes by every day. Scientists, and science teachers, find it hard to think anthropomorphically. Even if they can, what might an oak tree want to say?
Time works differently for trees – a day is a blink of time to something that can live for five hundred years.
A note on the oak in culture
Jules Acton’s book, Oaklore, Greystone books, 2024, describes many of the things that the oak tree has given our culture and is full of fascinating insights.
The oak galls seen in the story can be used to make a permanent ink that lasts. It is said that the Domesday Book and the Magna Carta were both written with oak gall ink.
The oak provides us with wood, upon which the Royal Navy depended for their warships. The ships in the Spanish Armada and the Battle of Trafalgar both used English oak.
“Heart of oak are our ships, Heart of oak are our men…”, as the old song goes.
Oaks feature heavily in English and British culture. In the civil war, the monarchy was saved when King Charles II hid in the Boscobel oak tree in the Midlands. Shakespeare used the Scottish “Birnham oak wood” to deceive Macbeth, and for Wordsworth, the oak tree was a symbol of strength and permanence.
“I am as English as St George, cricket and cider.”
I am sorry, I could not resist this. St George is thought to have been born in Cappadocia, a region in what is now modern-day Turkey. Cider-making may have originated in Northern France. The Romans noted that the Celtic tribes in Gaul (France) and Britain were fermenting crab apples into a type of cider by around 55 BCE.
The English oak (Quercus robur), is also regarded as a sacred native tree in France and Germany. In France it is called “Chêne rouvre” and in Germany Stieleiche, (the stalked oak).
Cricket, however, does seem to be uniquely English.