Diary of a Shopkeeper, 26th October

Visitors to the shop in recent days may have seen me scrabbling about on the paths and gravel of the courtyard. ‘Has the shopkeeper lost his mind? Or just his marbles?’ I haven’t lost anything. I’m finding things: acorns, loads of them.

Everyone visiting our shop walks under the boughs of our oak tree, laden with leaves in the summer, stark and bony in the winter. Quite often they pause to admire it. Oak trees aren’t common in Orkney. Someone who knows about such things told me there were between 10 and 20 across the county.

This oak was planted round around 1919 by John Gorie and Margaret Kirkness, who’d recently taken over the shop following the early death of Margaret’s brother. (It was at this point that James Kirkness, Grocer & Wine Merchant, because Kirkness & Gorie.) The story told by their daughter in law, Minnie Gorie, was that a friend in the country sent the couple a present of two pheasants wrapped in newspaper. When Margaret cut the first bird open, an acorn rolled out if its crop.

At that time the shop was on Broad Street, where The Longship clothes shop is now. Above was the flat where the extended family lived, and out the back were storage sheds for the business, and flower and vegetable gardens. John pushed the acorn into a flowerbed a few yards from the house, and everyone forgot about it. Until, a few years later, they noticed that a sturdy sapling was growing there. And it’s continued to grow ever since.

At around 106 years old, an oak would normally be twice the height of ours, but maybe it’s found its happy height, level with the surrounding rooftops. I imagine it, on a cold windy day like yesterday poking an exploratory twig a little bit higher: ‘Oh! Far too wild up there! I’ll just keep cooried down in this nice sheltered courtyard.’

The recent gales no doubt explain the great quantity of acorns littering the paths and garden. There are more than I’ve ever seen before, which suggests that 2025 is a mast year. Oaks don’t produce steady numbers of acorns each year. If they did, mice and birds would eat them all and the trees would not reproduce. Rather, by a regulatory mechanism no one fully understands, acorns are dropped in small numbers most years. This keeps the local predator population down. Then, roughly every five years, there’s a mast year, when tremendous numbers of acorns are produced. They cover the ground like nutty confetti. In fact, there are so many acorns that the local mice and birds can’t possibly eat them all. And so the acorns germinate, saplings rise up, and a new generation of oaks is established.

There’s not space in our courtyard for more than one oak. And the current one – I like to call it Gorie’s Oak – probably has another century to go. So I’ve been collecting the acorns this week in a old olive pot, with the notion of planting them somewhere and starting a little plantation. Gorie’s Grove, you might say.

In doing this I’m inspired by one of my favourite books, a novella by the French writer Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees. In the years following World War I (at exactly the time Gorie’s Oak was planted) a traumatised ex-soldier wanders the barren uplands of Provence. There he meets a solitary shepherd, who, while watching his sheep, has gradually planted thousands  of acorns across the desolate plateau. What was stony desert slowly turns verdant, as water is retained in the soil, plant life springs up in the shelter of the young oaks, and wildlife starts to return. Eventually human settlers arrive, amazed at the cool streams, the shade-trees, the abundant rabbits, deer and birds. None of them knows that an old shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier has worked single-handedly with nature to bring about this rebirth.

I’ve no grand plans like Elzéard. In fact I’ve on idea where I’m going to plant the acorns. But I feel I have to do something with them, rather than let them be eaten or die in the shadow of their parent. We used to buy wine direct from a winery called Château Saint-Jean lez Durance. It’s based in Manosque, about 90 kilometres north of Marseille. Manosque is also where Jean Giono was born and spent most of his life.

Brexit made it too expensive and complicated to import small amounts of wine from small producers in Europe, so we haven’t bought from them for a few years. During our stocktake, though, I came across a stray bottle of one of their whites, labelled ‘Que Ma Joie Demeure,’ which name comes from another novel by Giono. The literal translation is ‘May my joy remain,’ but the book is usually published as Joy of Man’s Desiring – alluding to a famous chorale by Bach. I prefer the literal translation. The joy of old trees is all about their survival over decades or centuries. Earlier on I referred to Gorie’s oak as ‘our‘ tree. The truth is, it was there long before we came on the scene, and will remain long after we’re gone. That gives me a lot of joy.

An Oscar-winning animated film version of The Man Who Planted Trees, by French-Canadian director Frédéric Back can be viewed here.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 30th October 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.