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Forest 4.O., forest, forest, forest, forward.

Hi, I'm Pearl Mackey. I play Pan.

And I'm here to introduce our 4th Pod Talk to accompany episode 4 of Forest 404.

So, Pan has just seen her first ever real-life tree.

They're more sci-fi than you think. Regenerating,

cloning themselves, living for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. James Aldred has spent

30 odd years in their company, climbing them, absailing down them, capturing them in photo and film.

The solitary underground tree in Forest 404 might well be the very last of its kind.

Here, James talks about the resilience of trees and meets what might be the longest surviving

sweet chestnut in the British Isles. Like Pan, I've come face to face with what can only be

described as a true relic, a survivor of a tree.

They reckon this tree is about 1,200 years old, which definitely makes it the oldest sweet chestnut

in Britain, if not Europe.

And so when you look at something as complicated and as big and gnarly as this, you realize you're sitting next to something which inhabits deep time on a scale far beyond anything we as human beings could ever hope to experience.

But even 1200 years is barely a quarter as old as the oldest known

individual tree on the planet, which is a bristlecone pine in places like Sierra Nevada

Mountains and is estimated to be at just over 5,000 years old.

What were we doing in Northern Europe and 3,000 BC?

Well, I suppose that was the Bronze Age.

We'd barely discovered how to harness the power of metal.

This longevity is due to a handful of abstract biological processes.

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