In May we launched an online competition to Guess the Weight of the OneOak tree – read more.

The competition closed at the end of August and we have one lucky winner who will receive a beautiful hand-carved bowl, made by master craftsman Martin Damen (see Martin Damen’s website).

The winning answer of 14.662 tonnes was only 277kg out from the correct answer of 14.385 tonnes (14385 kg).  Two runner up prizes will be presented, for the next two nearest guesses of 15.100 and 15.421 tonnes.

Foresters use tables to estimate the volume and weight of timber from a tree but these exclude the crownwood.  As you can see below, the crownwood actually weighed more than the tree’s massive stem; effectively 58% of the total weight.  This answer seems to have foxed even some of the best scientists who had a go at estimating the tree’s total weight.

Thank you to Ian Craig and colleagues of Forest Research who worked tirelessly over two days in the cold and wet to weigh every limb, branch and twig of the OneOak tree, and who then completed some serious number crunching in the laboratories of Forest Research at Alice Holt.

Dendrologist Daniel Miles, of Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory, has started work on the samples he collected from the OneOak tree when it was felled in January.  Work in studying the tree rings to estimate the tree’s age and to look at its growth history is not yet complete.  However, Daniel has revealed some stunning news:

1. All slices have now dried out with this spell of warm weather, and radial sections have now been cut, and the surfaces have been planed and sanded to a very high standard of smoothness, essential to ensure every ring can be clearly seen and measured under the microscope.  Even so, there is a band of rings in the first large branch, 33 feet above the ground, which was found to be rotten.  This branch has had a very serious injury to it sometime in the past and had virtually died, with a band of exceptionally narrow rings which will be almost impossible to measure, let alone count.  This is the branch that they had hoped to use as a brace at the Wallingford Museum but was found to have a rot pocket when cut; this is directly related to this band of very narrow rings.
2. Another interesting fact is that the preliminary ring count of the base of the tree, at one foot above the ground, is about 225 years, so the tree seems to have started growing shortly before 1785.

So, the tree experienced some form of major damaging event in its past, and it is about 65 years older than we thought.  The exact details have yet to confirmed but a planting date of 1785 or before would place its planting during the major landscape design phase of the Blenheim Estate undertaken by ‘Capability’ Brown.

In November we wrote about the children collecting oak acorns from the many beautiful oak trees around the Blenheim Palace Estate (read more here).  2009 was not a good year for oak seed collecting as very few trees had produced many acorns.  We had feared that even the 50 seeds that we thought looked healthy, still might not germinate.

Oak seedlings growing in the hands of Nicholsons

Under the skillful watchful eyes of tree nursery Nicholsons we are all delighted that many of the acorns have germinated.  A new generation of OneOak trees are now growing strongly.

We will soon be planning the replanting of the woodland area where the OneOak tree was felled.  We will have to add another 200 or so oak seedlings to our own Blenheim seedlings, so that every child involved in the project can plant a tree.  The replanting will probably take place in February 2011.