The tree in the feature photo is a cherry tree in the deer park at Studley Royal. This is a shot of it in flower, as it has blossomed every year for the last four hundred years. By rights, cherry trees don’t normally live beyond thirty years old. Forty is pushing it. This tree has a pedigree, and can prove its longevity, but as you can see, it’s in quite a bad way, and may not last much longer.
Our home patch is home to many vintage specimens. Look at this oak tree about a mile from our house. It could have been pushing its first tender roots down into the soil as William the Conqueror was sailing to our shores in 1066.
Come and have a look at some of our wonderful local trees, shaping the landscape, and now accorded legal protection: a right they surely deserve.
Even when their lives are finally over, their majestic fallen trunks and branches continue to feed the earth from which they came, and the creatures who call them home.
I have probably posted one or two of these shots before. Too bad. I think these trees deserve more than fifteen minutes of fame.
For Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #12: Trees
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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