From small acorns

Lynda Hallinan grows enough oak seedlings to plant a forest, then puts her tenacity to the test, stripping and restoring an old oak dining set.

The first tree I ever planted was an English oak (Quercus robur). As a chatty and curious child, one summer I struck up a roadside conversation with an old fella pricking out self-sown oaks from under the tree at the end of my grandparents’ lane on the Thames Coast. When I asked him what he was doing, he simply handed me a seedling in a milk carton and told me to take it home and plant it.

I subsequently found a spot for it on the edge of a fenced-off wetland on our family farm’s run-off block (where, fortuitously, my parents later retired). Three decades on, that tiny tree now towers over me. I wish I could say that small sapling has prospered into a mighty oak but I’d be stretching the truth a little. My oak tree is rather more mutant than majestic as, having lost its top in a wind storm, it now spreads mostly sideways rather than skyward.

Nonetheless, when I stand beneath its outstretched branches and stare up into that chartreuse canopy, I still feel immensely proud to have planted it, and I hope that one day my children, Lucas and Lachlan, will feel the same standing under their own oak trees.