Many of you will have heard of Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI of France. While the story is thought to be untrue, tradition has her saying of the starving peasants asking for bread, “Let them eat cake.” Lost her head in the end. Anyway, she had a favourite tree in the Palace of Versailles under which she often sat to do the things that Queens do. It was an oak tree. A venerable old tree more than 300 years of age which finally dropped its last leaves and was pronounced dead by the Office of National Forests. It had survived the French Revolution, several large-scale wars, and the great storms in 1999 which
