The Oak That Was Loved Too Much

In Sherwood Forest, the twelve hundred year old Major Oak, which according to legend once sheltered Robin Hood, failed to produce leaves this spring. What killed it was neither axe nor storm, but the footsteps of the millions who came to admire it!

In Sherwood Forest near Nottingham, the Major Oak, twelve hundred years old, did not produce leaves this spring and is now considered dead. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds announced it on Thursday. Rumors of its death had surfaced before, and each time the society confirmed that it was still alive. Not this time. That the tree bore no leaves this year was heartbreaking for everyone, said Hollie Drake of the society. What killed it cannot be said with certainty, but it was neither axe nor storm. For two centuries people came to see its twisted arms and the wide reaching canopy of its crown, and their footsteps compacted the soil so severely that rain could barely reach the roots. Added to that came the heat and drought of a warming climate, as well as the cables and supports used to hold up its heavy branches. Specialists found the root system suffocated and starved. One person wrote that it had been loved to death.

According to legend, the oak once sheltered Robin Hood, the outlaw of the thirteenth century who took from the rich and gave to the poor. He hid in the forest whenever the Sheriff of Nottingham pursued him. The tree has carried its name since Major Hayman Rooke mentioned it in a book about oaks in 1790, bringing the first admirers into the forest. That was how what eventually helped bring about its end two centuries later began: the love of the many.

The forest gave more than a legend. The oaks of Sherwood supplied the timber for ships that carried the fleet in the later years under Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, and their trunks remain in the roof structure of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The Major Oak, however, was spared the saw and has stood behind a fence since the 1970s. Ancient trees are Britain’s white rhinos, said Ed Pyne of the Woodland Trust, except that their disappearance is far less visible. Saving them is vital to the health of the world, and yet most disappear quietly, without the attention and care the Major Oak received.

So a tree older than most kingdoms dies not from lightning and not from the axe, but from the tenderness of those who wanted to see it. It is an old truth that love without restraint becomes a burden to the one being loved, and perhaps this is the most beautiful and at the same time the saddest death a tree can have. But the oak will remain standing in the heart of Sherwood, a monument of wood that visitors can still come and see, living on in the legend of Robin Hood. And in death, Hollie Drake said, it will give as much to the forest as it did in life, because even a fallen trunk still nourishes what grows around it.