00:00 Liverpool Beatles Museum has unveiled its newest addition, already home to one of the
00:06 largest Fab Four collections in the world. Its latest acquisition is also one of its
00:13 smallest. Two acorns from John Lennon and Yoko Ono's first ever peace event have found
00:19 their way to Matthew Street.
00:21 I'm stunned. They're bigger than I thought they were going to be. Sort of quite chunky
00:28 and obviously they would have chosen, whoever picked them would have chosen ones that they
00:33 would think had a good chance of surviving and growing.
00:38 In June 1968, John Lennon and Yoko Ono planted two acorns at Coventry Cathedral. A wrought
00:45 iron bench surrounding two acorns that would subsequently grow into oak trees had been
00:49 submitted by the couple for a sculpture exhibition.
00:53 We got contacted by a retired police officer who told us this tale. He pulled over a drunk
00:59 driver, they take him to the station, he's being arrested, he's going to get prosecuted.
01:05 Empty your pockets out. He empties his pockets out and wrapped up in tissue paper are these
01:10 two varnished acorns and of course they say, what are you walking around with acorns in
01:15 your pocket for? And being in an inebriated state he told them that they were John and
01:21 Yoko's acorns that they'd planted at Coventry Cathedral.
01:25 When Traffic Sergeant Mike Davies retired in 1980, he rediscovered the acorns in a desk
01:30 drawer. He has since gifted them to the Beatles Museum here in Liverpool.
01:35 They were sending two acorns to world leaders, acorns for peace to different world leaders.
01:42 Whether the different world leaders planted their acorns, well we'll have to go and that
01:46 will be the next part of the story. We'll track down all the world leaders. Did you
01:50 plant your acorns? The acorns were revealed to the public for
01:53 the first time by John Lennon's sister Julia Baird.
01:56 I have friends who are gardeners, like serious gardeners and they say, plant them. There's
02:03 magnolia seeds that have been thousands of years old that have been planted and some
02:07 take and some don't. So I think we're just going to have a go, maybe even with one of
02:14 them in a special pot and we'll find out soil and it'll have to be indoors for a while.
02:20 But it's possible that you could get a tree. We asked Julia where she thinks her late brother
02:26 would have liked these acorns to be replanted. Sefton Park is a fantastic place, but again,
02:34 from the middle of the country to the middle of our city, our beautiful park it is, isn't
02:40 it? The Beatles are the icons of our time, you
02:44 know. They are living legends. They will be remembered the same way that Strauss, Mozart,
02:51 Beethoven, Picasso, Da Vinci and the list goes on, the same way that they're remembered.
02:58 It's never going to go away and what they did was unprecedented.
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