Feb 3, 2026 · 31 min · 11 segments
Isabella’s guest is Harriet Rix, the Indiana Jones of tree science. She’s chased down rare trees in some of the remotest, wildest places in the world, and in the UK she’s worked for DEFRA, researching…
Harriet RixGuest
Isabella TreeHost
They're stuck here in the ground for hundreds, if they're lucky, thousands of years.
But actually they're incredibly dynamic because they're able to breed because of the pollen coming from miles and miles away.
Yeah, and oaks always keep the same number of chromosomes, and so that means that in between they can breed very happily with each other.
And it's funny because in this landscape more than any other I think I know of in England, you can feel that dynamism, you can feel them moving, you can feel them coming back into the landscape and probably adapting to it.
I mean, I don't know how often you've found new and exciting ways that oaks are sort of moving through your landscape.
So that genetic variety and their ability to continue interbreeding with themselves and other species of oaks in over vast areas provides a sort of almost infinite genetic variety that is going to see them through climate change and extreme weather events and all sorts of diseases and things that might threaten them, at least they've got a greater chance if they are colonising naturally, regenerating in a landscape like this,
And so it's a really interesting example of where you have huge genetic diversity in every acorn.
And then when the oaks are germinating, when the acorns are germinating, they're also making genetic changes.
They're also upregulating genes which will allow them to fit into the landscape that they are growing up in.
So they're sort of adapting to their current circumstances and they have this amazing long history of genetics that will allow them to adapt to the fluctuations in climate.
They're stuck here in the ground for hundreds, if they're lucky, thousands of years.
But actually they're incredibly dynamic because they're able to breed because of the pollen coming from miles and miles away.
Yeah, and oaks always keep the same number of chromosomes, and so that means that in between they can breed very happily with each other.
And it's funny because in this landscape more than any other I think I know of in England, you can feel that dynamism, you can feel them moving, you can feel them coming back into the landscape and probably adapting to it.
I mean, I don't know how often you've found new and exciting ways that oaks are sort of moving through your landscape.
So that genetic variety and their ability to continue interbreeding with themselves and other species of oaks in over vast areas provides a sort of almost infinite genetic variety that is going to see them through climate change and extreme weather events and all sorts of diseases and things that might threaten them, at least they've got a greater chance if they are colonising naturally, regenerating in a landscape like this,
And so it's a really interesting example of where you have huge genetic diversity in every acorn.
And then when the oaks are germinating, when the acorns are germinating, they're also making genetic changes.
They're also upregulating genes which will allow them to fit into the landscape that they are growing up in.
So they're sort of adapting to their current circumstances and they have this amazing long history of genetics that will allow them to adapt to the fluctuations in climate.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
