Thanks to the Guardian for bringing the above book to our attention:

‘The trees are trying to tell us things’: the ecologist championing Britain’s ancient forests

Ted Green, a conservation adviser to the crown estate at Windsor, has a provocative take on our ‘living heritage’

Ted Green is a rebel. He calls sheep “land maggots”. A horse-riding centre is “a dog-food complex”. And the ancient tree expert’s new book includes a photo of him sticking up two fingers at a portrait of Margaret Thatcher.

But the influential, iconoclastic Green, 89, who has lived his whole life around Windsor Great Park and still works as a conservation adviser for the crown estate, is also a staunch advocate for King Charles’s protection of Britain’s unique trove of ancient trees.

Taking the Guardian on a grand tour of Windsor Great Park, which contains one of the greatest concentrations of old oaks in the world, Green says the king is not only conserving these irreplaceable, uniquely biodiverse living monuments but their genetics in the next generation of ancient trees.

We pass through private gates where he once trespassed, and Green points to King Offa’s oak, a spectacularly stout and sprawling oak which could be 1,300 years old.

“The tree you are looking at is a 1000-year-old gene bank with more than thousand-year-old gene-bank soil,” he says. “Conserving the genes of these ancient trees is absolutely priceless.”

The sapling next to it – and dozens of others across the park – have been personally planted by the king, after being successfully propagated from twigs of ancient oaks to preserve their unique genes in the next generation.

Crucially, mycorrhizal fungi and micro-organisms associated with the ancient tree should colonise the graft sapling’s roots – which are grown from Windsor acorns – to ensure the biological continuity of hundreds of species supported by the original old tree.

“He’s a good lad,” says Green of the king.

Green has spent his life challenging authority and scientific orthodoxies. Born in the village of Cheapside bordering the park, Green’s father was missing at war for much of his childhood and was later confirmed dead when a US submarine sank a Japanese boat that did not have any markings to show that it was carrying prisoners of war. Green and his war-widow mother were evicted from their home and lived for two years in an ex-army concrete shed with a leaking roof…

Read the whole article here.