It’s one of the classic consequences of a tree’s longevity that as it reaches its most impressive age, the physical bulk usually diminishes with the years. The Marton Oak has at least retained a palimpsest of its former full-trunked magnificence, because four separately curving remnants at least indicate the tree’s circumference in its prime. It has also retained this hollowed-out shape for 200 years and even now measures 14 metres at human-chest height. What is most moving is its age. It’s considerably older than the better-known Major Oak of Sherwood Forest and may be Europe’s oldest individual sessile oak. It has long been celebrated in books and articles and listed in inventories of ancient trees, and is the subject of frequent pilgrimage. I cherish, however, that this 1,400-year-old has a deep preference for the quotidian, because all this venerable life is slap-bang in someone’s garden (and visits require prior permission). Standing at its centre, where the heartwood first launched its massive span of memories, I reflected on what it is about some organisms that evoke our reverence. Of course, the tree is old. But the heritage of all life is unimaginably ancient. Somehow we take the universal presence of the entire miracle so much for granted. As I manoeuvred about the oak, my hands picked up a green powder – an alga, I guess, but who knows its precise name or ponders its own extraordinary journey? Yet this “dust” had forebears that gave rise to this magnificent tree above me and is itself a fully equal party to the unitary wholeness of life. As a means to imagine that entire shared heritage, I suggest that we think of the changes, seasons, years, human dramas, events, eras – all of the comings and goings – to which this one tree has been witness. Imagine the full filmic sequence of it. Yet to get at life’s entire lineage on Earth – of alga, oak and of us – you’d have to play out this memory sequence an additional 2.7m times more. Life right now, all of it, everywhere, is ancient and sacred. I wish we treated it as we treat this one tree.