Excerpt from Endeavour by Peter Moore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

People did not need to know Milo's story to recognise the oak's strength. They only had to look around them, to the great manor houses and cathedrals that adorned the landscape, to the towers and bridges and a hundred everyday objects from mill wheels to casks, cudgels, daggers and poles. To look at the parish oak as Cullum and White did during these years was to stir associations of quiet, brooding might. Both intrigued by nature, the clergymen may have realised that an oak derives its strength from its shape. A mature specimen can be three times as wide as it is tall. On a January day when the tree is stripped of its leaves you can absorb this. There it stands, serpentine limbs outstretched. When winds whip through these branches they sway and strain like levers, gathering up elemental energy. The forces are channelled backwards, from the budding tips, to the smallest branches and back along the boughs to the trunk. The motion creates massive stress forces. When 60 mph winds gust against the tree, it is equivalent to a weight of 220 tons. Oaks, like all nature, seek equilibrium. They respond by fortifying their wood and stiffening their fibres.

This is what the oaks would have done at Hawstead and Selborne, as would the other cherished English oaks: the Darley Oak in Cornwall, the Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire or the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest. In a society changing fast, these oak trees provided powerful links with the past. They were the perpetual survivors, the time-hallowed, stoic relics of a medieval age. But these were not the trees that had made the country great. Those that had were the young oaks, aged between 50–150 years old, felled in a continuous harvest to build anything that had to last and needed to be strong. As the Cambridge ecologist Oliver Rackham later put it, this left England a place 'of young or youngish trees, like a human population with compulsory euthanasia at age thirty'.

Excerpted from Endeavour by Peter Moore. Copyright © 2019 by Peter Moore. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.