Visingsö Oaks
I love the story from Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn of how oaks were planted as New College in Oxford was built, to replace the wooden beams several hundred years later when they would inevitably get attacked by beetles.
As I scanned through Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now, I found the following:
Visingsö, in the Swedish lake Vättern, has a gorgeous mature oak forest whose origin came to light in 01980 [Y10K proof ‘1980’] when the Swedish Navy received a letter from the Forestry Department reporting that the requested ship lumber was now ready. It turned out that in 01829 the Swedish Parliament, recognizing that it takes one hundred fifty years for oaks to mature and anticipating that there would be a shortage of timbers for its navy in the 01990s, ordered twenty thousand trees to be planted and protected for the navy.