Many are host to so many other creatures that each is a city: as cosmopolitan as Delhi or New York and far more populous than either. Some redwoods and Douglas firs and eucalypts are as tall as a perfectly respectable skyscraper, and there's an extraordinary banyan in Calcutta that would cover a football field. Some living trees have seen the rise and fall of entire civilisations. And some of California's pines germinated at about the time that human beings invented writing and so are as old as all of written history. Many a redwood still standing tall in California was ancient by the time Columbus first made Europe aware that the Americas exist. Conceivably: at about the time that Jesus was born Pilate's father was a soldier in those parts - and by then that yew was already mature. A yew I met in a churchyard in Scotland has a label suggesting that the young Pontius Pilate may once have sat in its shade - 'and wondered what the future held'.

And why not? All this happened only about three and a half centuries ago (1651) and oaks may live for two or three times as long as that. His new book on trees looks set to become a classic reference, in the mould of Oliver Rackham's `History of the Countryside.'Īt Boscobel in Shropshire in the English Midlands stands the Royal Oak, where the provisional King Charles II is alleged to have hidden from Cromwell's men after the Battle of Worcester. Colin Tudge has a fine reputation as a natural history writer who can take complicated ideas and express them with clearness and passion.

The secret lives of trees book