The three-year seasoning period was brief beside the roughly two centuries required to grow major oak timber. Trees planted in the late sixteenth century could furnish ships built in the decades before Trafalgar. Because those forests were established before anyone knew the dimensions or number of the eventual ships, naval planners had to provide material for an unknown future fleet. The wooden navy depended on an intergenerational procurement system whose physical decisions outlived the strategy that initiated them.
Notable Point · 1:25:30-1:27:20
Planting oak for a fleet two centuries away
Oak planted around the Armada era could supply ships built before Trafalgar, making naval forestry an intergenerational procurement system.