Wooden Oak Tree – Large Eight-Piece Hand-Painted Forest Toy

About the Oak Tree

No tree in Britain supports more life than the English oak: more than 2,300 species of insects, birds, mammals, fungi and lichens depend on it for food or shelter. Oaks grow slowly and live long – some are more than 1,000 years old – and a young oak may wait around 40 years before it grows its first acorns.

Many of those acorns are planted by a bird. In autumn, the jay buries thousands of acorns in the ground as a winter store, and every acorn it forgets has the chance to become a new oak.

• Six crown sections
• Trunk
• Base

Also available as a Small Oak Tree. Build a woodland with the Large Birch Tree and Large Fir Tree, or see the Oak Trees Covered by Snow.

Assembled tree – Height × Width × Depth: 31.0 × 23.0 × 3.6 cm (12.2 × 9.1 × 1.4 in)

All pieces are shaped from solid ash wood and hand-sanded to a smooth finish with no sharp edges. The crowns and base are hand-painted with water-based paints, the trunk keeps the natural grain of the ash, and every piece is finished with olive oil, which protects the wood against moisture. No plastics, no solvent-based finishes, no MDF, no veneers. Made in conformity with the European toy safety standard EN 71. Small variations in colour and grain are a natural part of handmade production, not defects.

The great tree at the heart of the forest.

With six separate crown sections, the oak is the most puzzle-like tree in our collection: children fit each crown onto its branch, take them off again, and discover how the parts make a whole. Once standing, it gives a woodland scene its centre – a place for owls, squirrels, deer and families to gather.

Inspired by Montessori and Waldorf principles, the oak opens real stories about nature: why animals depend on one tree, how a jay plants an oak without meaning to, why some trees live for a thousand years. There are no batteries, sounds or buttons – the child leads the play.

Solid ash is dense and hard-wearing, and every piece is sanded and painted by hand in our workshop in Romania. Tree by tree, the forest grows with the child and lasts long enough to be passed on.