Oaks

Overview

Oaks are the great broad-leaved trees of the cradle-web's lighter woods, and of all trees the most useful to a basin village. They drop the acorns that fatten the pigs in autumn, give the heavy beams of bridges, barns, and halls, and give the bark that tans the hides. The broad-crowned edge oak of the forest margins, the best of the timber, is described under Timber Trees.

Appearance

An oak in the open is broader than it is tall, with a short, massive trunk and great crooked limbs that spread low and wide; in a wood it grows taller and straighter. The bark is grey, rough, and furrowed deep into ridges, and an old trunk is often hollow. The leaves are lobed, wavy-edged, and leathery, dark green above and paler below; they come late in spring and turn brown in autumn, and young oaks keep their dead leaves rattling through winter. In spring it hangs thin yellow-green catkins. Its acorns, in autumn, are glossy brown nuts the length of a thumb-joint set in rough, scaly grey cups. Round galls the size of a marble grow on the twigs, and an old oak is crowded with moss, lichen, fern, and the nests of everything.

Habitat and Range

Oaks grow on deep soils in the lowland and foothill country: the scattered woods and wood-pasture of the Confluence Basins, the lower slopes of the Headwater Marches below the pine, hedgerow trees left standing between fields, and the margins of the Elderweald, where the edge oak stands.

Behaviour and Temperament

An oak grows slowly and lives very long. It bears acorns heavily only every few years, and in a mast year every oak in a district bears at once. Cut to the stool, it regrows as coppice; cut above a beast's reach, it puts out a crown of poles that can be cut again and again for centuries.

Life Cycle

Acorns fall in autumn and are eaten by pigs, boar, deer, squirrels, and jays, which bury more than they find, and so plant the next wood. A seedling grows slowly for a lifetime, stands in its prime for centuries, and declines for centuries more, hollow and still leafing.

Uses and Dangers

Each autumn the village pigs are turned into the oak woods under the lord's pannage right (see Pigs), and in a mast year the whole basin's bacon is better. Acorns, soaked and leached of their bitterness, make a flour for famine bread. Oak timber is heavy, hard, and slow to rot, and goes into bridges, mill wheels, barn frames, ships, and the halls of lords; it is the wood of the corridor's water-gates and of many a bridge's spans. Its bark, stripped in spring, tans leather, and its galls and bark with iron make the black ink of the record-houses. Its charcoal heats the smithies.

A mast year's acorns poison cattle that eat them green and in quantity. Otherwise the oak's only harm is its limbs, which fall without warning from old trees.

Lore and Belief

Oaks are believed to draw lightning, and many peoples hold a struck oak sacred; basin folk carry an acorn against being struck. Old oaks are meeting places: a lord's judgement, a boundary oath, or a marriage sworn under a named oak is held to bind the harder. The reading stand of the Keeper of Scrolls is said to be carved from an ancient oak, and scribes keep an oak-gall ink pot as a small devotion. Wood Elves say an oak at the forest edge is the forest's oldest watcher over the fields. Outlaws of the basin woods meet under hollow oaks and hide their plunder in them, and every oak wood has a tale of the silver found in one.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi