This Quest is to visit the surviving trees from the Jubilee Tree collection. These trees were selected by the UK Tree Council in 2002 to celebrate the Queen's Golden Jubilee. They were originally supposed to be the fifty greatest trees in Britain. Commentator's curse. The 1000-year-old Sidney Oak promptly died. Then the 1500-year-old Pontfadog Oak blew over in a storm and the original Bramley apple tree contracted some disfiguring disease. The Selborne Yew should never have been on the list in the first place, having died in 1995, seven years before the list was compiled. It is now just a stump covered in brambles and redcurrent bushes.
It looks like COVID has put paid to the Panshanger Giant Oak. It has been in a Tarmac (Lafarge) enclosure for years, but they no longer seem keen to allow people in. On a recent visit we just walked around the side of the padlocked gate, but it looks like visitors are not really welcome. It has been removed from this Quest, hopefully only temporarily.
The Domesday Oak has fallen on hard times. It was being held together with wires and props when we saw it previously. One of if the wires failed in 2018, causing more than half of it to fall off. What's left is not much bigger than the nettles that surround it. It is a sad sight, especially surrounded as it is by a park full of beautiful trees. We have left it in the Quest for now. It is yet another that has lost its plaque, it is the least impressive of a grove of many oak trees, and there are lots of photos on the Internet of people standng beside the wrong tree. In case you have trouble finding it, here is a link to the map of Ashton Park.
Your mission is to visit the 46 remaining trees in the Jubilee Tree Collection. Your reward for completing this quest is the title Jubilee Master Arborealist. There are intermediate ranks of Apprentice, Junior, Senior and Expert for visiting 5, 15, 25 and 35 trees respectively. Most of the trees are in a 100 mile diameter donut around the East Midlands. You could visit 30 of them in a couple of days. Some of the others are very remote, at the furthest reaches of Scotland, Cornwall and Wales. You will have richly deserved the Master rank if you visit them all.
On a recent visit to see the World's End Black Poplar, we noticed that its plaque had been stolen and that the Google Maps reference is 50m wrong. The black poplar is the lighter coloured tree with upwards pointing branches in the photo above. It has triangular leaves, catkins in the spring, and a deeply grooved trunk. It was sad to see it getting squeezed from both sides and looking a bit neglected. Let's hope someone adopts it.
Likewise, the Heavitree Yew was looking a shadow of its former self on a recent visit, and its plaque is also missing. Someone told us that its roots had been damaged by the road leading to the church door and that there was a plan to fix it. Let's hope it is successful.