Country diary: This 550-year-old tree stands for all of life

A buzzard drifts over an avenue in the park. Shredded by the last storm, the lime trees’ intricate tracery bleeds into a grey afternoon as the sun melts like butter in a pan. None of the details are solid or reliably material – fading light, mizzle, shadow – sodden earth and ditchwater sky are bridged by trees that seem to flicker out of focus.

This fade to black feels more prescient for the future of trees and the living world now than it once did. For example, plans for the Shrewsbury northern relief road include the removal of many trees, including a 550-year-old veteran named Darwin’s oak, so called because Charles Darwin grew up just down the road and would have known this tree. Darwin would also have known the great Shelton oak nearby, which had a girth of 26ft, according to JG Strutt’s 1826 Sylva Britannica, but was blown down in the 1940s, its remains removed to build a road.

Related: ‘Darwin’s oak’ to be felled to make way for Shrewsbury bypass

Imagine, around 1483 – when Richard III murdered the princes in the tower (both princes had strong Shropshire connections) – a jay took an acorn from the Shelton oak nearby, which would have been about the same age then as the Darwin oak is now, and dropped it in a hole under a nearby hedge. Nearly 550 years later, this tree inherits an ancient community of life and a legacy of veneration through millennia.

Perhaps these oaks are what Darwin had in mind when he described the tree of life as a metaphor for evolution – a branching process of descent through modification and extinction – when he published On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859. Since then, 164 years later (not long in tree time) the landscape has become increasingly dominated by roads and traffic. Perhaps Shropshire’s Conservative councillors want to replace Darwin’s tree metaphor for one that suits their interests – tarmac.

Fade to black. Until then, the oaks, limes and other deciduous trees flare with a visionary light in that moment of alchemical brilliance when they change into their dark, winter selves. They also fill us with fierce hope, and the campaign to save Darwin’s oak, and other trees and habitats threatened with the chop, gathers support at a time when all the living world is in crisis.

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