The Clever Design of Conkers
Note: this short piece of writing is the first in a series where I jot down little sparks of inspiration that shape how I think about design. I took both of these photos in the same location in Ruskin Park, London. The first this September, the second last April.
Often, I am awe-struck by the clever design of the natural world.
While reading the book 'Braiding Sweetgrass' recently, I came across the idea of 'mast fruiting' - and it left me thinking: "that really is SO clever".
In a nutshell - trees such as oak, conker, and beech don’t produce the same crop of nuts every year: “some years a feast, most years a famine, a boom and bust cycle known as mast fruiting” (Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer).
So what?​
Growing a nut requires high levels of energy in the form of sugar, and if a tree plodded along making a steady amount of nuts each year, they would all be eaten by squirrel-like predators, and no new trees would grow.
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Instead, “mast-fruiting trees spend years making sugar, and rather than spending it little by little, they stick it under the proverbial mattress, banking calories as starch in their roots” (ibid). When a mast year arrives, all of the sugar banks are spent at once, resulting in a bumper nut harvest that overwhelms any hungry squirrel.
And the most intriguing part?
Mast years are not one-off events for individual trees. If they were, predators could handle a glut of nuts from only a handful of trees.
Instead, “If one tree fruits, they all fruit - there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in a forest, but every grove; all across the country” (ibid).
Mast years occur every 5 - 10 years. How the trees communicate and coordinate, we do not yet know.
Not long after reading Braiding Sweetgrass, I was walking through Ruskin Park in South London. I noticed the ground was carpeted in beautiful conkers, and I wondered if this was a mast year.
I was awe-struck by the intelligent design of this natural, mast fruiting system. I left the park feeling inspired, that even in this new age of AI, there is still so much to discover and learn from the intricate systems that lie beneath our feet.
It reminded me that good design isn’t always about efficiency alone - sometimes it’s about timing, coordination, and cooperation.
