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.
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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.
An eminent bird scientist spotted Green’s potential and encouraged him into a technician job at Imperial College’s field station close to the park.
Green’s advice to the Knepp estate about its struggling ancient oaks played a crucial role in its owners Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree rewilding their land.
According to Tree, Green “is mycorrhizal fungi” – a connector of ideas and people, an “original, free thinker” who constantly challenges received wisdom and conservation dogma.
He is relaxed about non-native trees, says shade is worse for British woods than high deer populations, and is a fierce critic of “the current unimaginative national crusade to cover our countryside in dense, dark, lifeless plantation forestry … under the guise of carbon capture”.
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