What does an acorn look like?
Some acorns harvested from different species of oak tree around my home near the DMZ.
Recently, my neighbour in our village near the DMZ had hundreds of acorns laid out in front of his house in preparation for being soaked so the bitter tannins are leached away to make acorn powder for the jelly called dotori-mok. As I mentioned in a previous post from this time last year, acorn jelly is very popular over here. It’s very nutritious. A few days ago, a colleague of my wife’s assured her that it’s renowned for helping lower blood pressure. So, in today’s post I will indulge my interest in the oak tree again, and in the second part I’ll share some fascinating European oak ‘politics’.
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In Korean, to describe what we call the oak tree they often say 참나무, cham namu, which literally translates as ‘true tree’ , but also 떡갈 나무, tteoggal namu, which generically refers to all native species of oak tree but is actually the name of one species, Quercus dentata. My neighbour’s acorns probably came from Quercus Acutissima, aka the sawtooth oak, Quercus dentata, aka the sweet oak or daiymo oak, or Quercus aliena, aka oriental white oak or galcham oak, which are common around here. Dentata is less common, as is the generally most common of all the oaks in Korea - Quercus mongolica, the Mongolian oak.
I doubt Europeans and North Americans would recognize most of the nuts and cups gathered in the photo above as belonging to oak trees. Take a look at four:
Clockwise from top left are acutissima, dentata, mongolica and aliena..
As you can see, the acorn cups of the top two are very different from those of the two most common oaks that were familiar to me and anyone else living in north-western Europe, which are Quercus petraea, the sessile oak, and Quercus robur, the pedunculate or common oak (or, as it’s proprietorially known where I come from, the English oak):
On the left here are the acorns of the sessile oak, and at top right of the pedunculate. They are identical, except for the latter having stalks (or peduncules). Source: oak.https://www.gardensillustrated.com/plants/trees/how-to-identify-oak-trees.
Of the six main native species of oak in Korea, only Quercus aliena has acorn cups quite similar to those of European oaks, while Quercus mongolica looks like a more rugged version. Korean and European oaks are also very different in tree structure, bark, and leaf form, but both are also very different from the oaks native to North Americans. So, it’s interesting to consider that although an English person and an American both will say or write ‘oak tree’ and assume they’re referring to the same thing, they’re almost certainly visualizing distinctly different-looking trees.
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Speaking of Europe, I’ve discovered that the oak tree is interestingly implicated within a complex web of modern-day ideological confrontation and war.
For example, it came as a shock to learn that the Nazis had a special thing about the oak tree. At the beginning of the twentieth century the German nation’s nature-protection movement was more developed than anywhere else and recognizing that the oak in particular bore the special imprint of German history, German culture, and German habits, attitudes, and tastes. The National Socialists exploited this native love of the forest, and of the oak tree in particular. The Hitler Youth badge of honour contained oak leaves, and its Wandervogel wing of weekend hikers was in some ways a precursor to today’s Forest Schools and other organization which combine education and immersion in nature. The Party’s motto was blut unt boden (“blood and soil”), and the heady myth of the wild untameable forest as the mystical source of the German Volk’s racial strength and purity was vigorously promoted. The Nazis celebrated the pantheistic dreams of the German Romantic poets, the artist Caspar David Friedrich’s moody paintings of death-haunted winter trees, and the composer Wagner’s Teutonic melodramatic operas, which often have forest settings. Their propaganda machine even claimed that the briefcase bomb intended to kill Hitler, which was planted by a group of dissident German officers in July 1943, failed to kill its target thanks to the protection afforded by a sturdy German oak table.
The Nazi’s love of the oak tree also explains why one year-old saplings were presented to the gold medalists at the notorious Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. Interestingly, the choice was not the sessile oak, the dominant species throughout Germany, but the pedunculate, aka the English oak. But the symbolism of the ‘‘Olympic’ or ‘Hitler oaks’ didn’t quite have the intended effect. Jesse Owens, the African-American athlete who put paid to the Nazi’s Aryan vision of racial athletic superiority by winning spectacularly at the Games, came home with three saplings, one of which is today growing healthily beside Rhodes High School in Cleveland, where Owens trained.
Jesse Owens with his three Hitler oak sapling. Source :https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/owens-medals
At How Hill on the UK’s Norfolk Broads there’s a very odd-looking oak tree stump with a yacht carved at the top and the famous symbol of the Olympic Games etched in black onto its side. This is all that now remains today of a Hitler oak planted by the British Olympic yachting team’s helmsman Christopher Boardman:
As the Nazi’s exploitation of the German people’s affections for the oak tree demonstrates, like many other things in the twentieth century a tree could become an ideological freighted symbol enlisted to further a cause. The German nature myths, the deep-rooted idea that the forest is the shadowy counterpoint to the domesticated values of society and exposes its vulnerability and artificiality, could be perverted with terrible consequences.
Sometimes the oak tree would be witness to terrible acts of human barbarism; during the Second World War the dense foliage of the great oaks of the primordial forest of Poland, for example, hid places where Jews were shot by German forces and buried in mass graves. And within the dark depths of these same vast eastern European forests, resistance fighters withdrew then suddenly emerged to harry the invading Germans.
Fortunately, the oak could also become a potent anti-Nazi symbol. In central France in the Forest of Tronçais, near where I have a house, one of the veteran oaks (born around 1640) is today called ‘Chêne de la Résistance’ (The Resistance Tree). But it used to be called ‘The Maréchal Pétain Oak’ in honour of Philippe Pétain, the ruler of the Unoccupied Zone or Vichy France, the notorious regime that collaborated with the Nazis, and under whose jurisdiction the forest was placed at that time. The tree-naming ceremony in 1940 was held in the leader’s presence, as this archival photograph commemorating the event shows:
Pétain was back in the forest again in 1942 visiting the large camps located there of chantiers de jeunesse, a compulsory youth movement similar to the Hitler Youth that required young Frenchmen in the Unoccupied Zone to serve patriotically for a period of time. But some of the local woodcutters didn’t like having a tree named after the Vichy leader, and in February 1944, several months before D-Day, three of them scaled the wire protecting the tree, then one climbed the perfectly straight trunk to remove the plaque saying ‘Chêne Maréchal Pétain’, replacing it by a sign that said, “Chêne Gabriel Péri Patriote français fusillé par les nazis” (‘The Gabriel Péri French Patriot Shot by the Nazis Oak’). Péri was a prominent communist journalist, politician, and member of the Resistance movement. The woodcutters also adorned the plaque with a huge red bow tie, made from a scarf and tied to the tree with barbed wire. Their rebellious intervention didn’t last long, of course, and it actually took almost forty years before the tree was officially renamed the ‘Chêne de la Résistance. En Souvenir de l‘acte de 13 Février 1944’, which is what you can see today if you visit the tree:
NOTES
My previous posts on oaks and acorns:
https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/acorn-for-dinner
https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/acorns
An excellent book that explores the complex relationship between the oak, the forest, and culture is: Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory. Especially interesting is Chapter 2:
https://www.amazon.com/Landscape-Memory-Simon-Schama/dp/0679735127