Oak
An introduction to wood-pastures
The bark is harvested from young branches — Cortex Quercus. It has no smell, and its taste is astringent and slightly bitter. All species of the Quercus genus are medicinal.
Dr. Ing. Emil Păun: Sănătatea Carpaților (The Health of the Carpathians - 1995), p. 188 translated by me
We live in Transylvania, Romania. My two preschool daughters attend a forest kindergarten founded by three wonderful mothers. One of them diligently and lovingly cares for oak seedlings and bullies other parents into doing so. We then, at times, go out into fields chosen by biologists, children and all, to plant them into the protection of wild-grown bushes and human-made stakes.
Apparently, oaks are notoriously hard to regenerate and need a lot of human pampering (there is even a Wikipedia entry on oak regeneration failure). We could argue, however, that oak trees simply dislike a landscape that, over the past centuries, we imagined and shaped into clear-cut lines between closed forests and open habitats. Finding themselves classified as inhabitants of the former, their light-loving seedlings simply do not flourish. What they do seem to like is human disturbance. Give them uncultivated field margins and hedges, stone piles, ruins, railway- and roadsides or forests “managed” by cutting, coppicing, litter raking, burning, or pasturing, and you will have oaks growing.
To shift our very focused attention away from mysterious deep forests as the sole vestiges of Nature – although who doesn’t like mysterious deep forests – one of the perhaps least disappeared habitats loved by oaks are wood-pastures. Wood-pastures are places maintained through specific human management practices, including livestock grazing, forestry practices (such as logging, coppicing, or pollarding), shrub clearing, cutting tall vegetation, and controlled burning. They also hold exceptional ecological value, with rich biodiversity, often harbouring trees older than those in forests, distinctive bird, insect, and fungal communities, and genetic diversity.
My love of wood-pastures, apart of the obvious beauty, wonder, and awe their buzzing life instills, stems from the way, that contrary to the imagery of the pure wilderness of deep-dark forests, they so clearly show us how human choices and traditions have the possibility to create habitats of life. Walk a mile on overgrazed pastures, with no trees or shrubs, acres left open to the scorching heat of the summer sun, or have a picnic under a mighty oak tree on a wood-pasture, and you know what I mean by habitats of life. And yet, both are possibilities of human (co-)created worlds. Perhaps we should ask: what kinds of worlds do we co-create with oaks?