An acorn tree?

How strange is this?

This little seedling has leaves... and one ripe acorn! I posted it in the Woodland Trust forum, but nobody has told me what's going on.

I found it in a new wood that I visited. It's a relatively young plantation. All the ashes seem to be dying, but the oaks look well.

And, under the canopy, inside the wood, I saw a fair few oak seedlings - though only one with an acorn.

I quite liked it in there. A pair of squirrels chased each other toward me. One dashed past, the other screeched to a halt about fifteen feet away. Then both started foraging.

I was happy to be in the sunshine. I'd just had an annual health review (still alive, apparently) and a dental check up, so it was doubly good to get out.

No climbable trees and no oaks in the plantation with much of a personality as yet.

Another unclimbable tree, but one I like, had an interesting little fungal fruit in the bark.

It was small - the size of a big man's thumb.

My feeling for oak trees seems to get deeper. Kev told me today that oak trees time the germination of their acorns so that there are replacement trees around when the mother tree falls. This is interesting, in relation to the idea of the formation of sacred groves around oak trees, but then how come the young oaks in the plantation produced acorns that germinated??

On that, I was struck by how many acorns I saw there. The path was littered with them. There are nowhere near as many under the old oaks at the Reserve.

Today, we were clearing more sycamores.

A corporate group had been there a few days earlier and cut down loads. The air smells sweet... the leaves or the wood, I don't know. The sweetness of sycamores dying. Some of the oaks were suffering with the sheer number of sycamores and the shade they cast over the lower branches of the oaks.

You may recall that I was ambivalent about this last year. This time, maybe less so. There are always trade-offs. There can be no diktats. Every rule has the potential to turn you into a tyrant. Plus, the oaks!!!

That said, it can never feel great to cut a tree. I left these two as the badgers had used them as scratching posts.