'There is no oak left': are Britain's trees disappearing?

The first national 'tree champion' is charged with reversing the fortunes of the country's woodlands and beleaguered urban trees

England is running out of oak. The last of the trees planted by the Victorians are now being harvested, and in the intervening century so few have been grown - and fewer still grown in the right conditions for making timber - that imports, mostly from the US and Europe, are the only answer.

"We are now using the oaks our ancestors planted, and there has been no oak coming up to replace it," says Mike Tustin, chartered forester at John Clegg and Co, the woodland arm of estate agents Strutt and Parker. "There is no oak left in England. There just is no more."