29th May .. Oak Apple Day
Until I reached the august age of ten years old, I woke in dread on 29th May each year of not decorating my jacket with a leafy sprig of oak before venturing out on the road to school. When suitably adorned, I could join the group of fellow pupils already on way as they repeatedly chanted, “Twenty-ninth of May is oak-apple day”. Anyone not wearing oak leaves was punished by older boys who thrashed our bare legs with nettle stems. Schoolboys in those days, winter or summer did not wear long trousers!
We had little idea of what that was all about. Later, I heard the tale of Prince Charles fleeing from his Parliamentary pursuers after the Royalist forces had been defeated at the battle of Worcester in 1651. After many adventures, he reached safety in France. On one occasion he hid in an oak tree. When the monarchy was restored in 1660 and he became King Charles II, his birthday on 29th May was celebrated each year.
What had oak-apples to do with him, his birthday or the battle? Absolutely nothing. It was pure coincidence that the spectacular growths on oaks develop towards the end of May so formed a rather tenuous connection in peoples’ minds.
Oak-apples are large galls which grow out of terminal buds on tender twigs. They can assume the size of golf balls. Colours vary from pale green through shades of yellow, pink and on to red so contrast with the delicate tints of emerging leaves. Inside each lie the grubs of the responsible gall-wasp. Up to sixty of these larvae, each in a distinct cell, are crowded into the structure. Growth is rapid. By the end of July the non-stinging adults emerge from the pupal stage and take to the air. The galls fall to the ground looking like fragments of dried up cellular sponge. At all stages we have reminders of that complicated period of history, if we know that story of course.
