There is a wonderful story floating around about foresight in the 1300s. Stewart Brand captures it nicely in this video. The story is summed up on the website of New College as follows:

…when the college fellows decided to restore the hall roof in 1862, they were wondering where to get the oak for the beams in the new roof Gilbert Scott proposed to build for them. The college woodsman pointed out that their predecessors had planted acorns in their Buckinghamshire woods in about 1380, so that mature trees would be available when needed for the repair of the buildings.

It is a great story that encapsulates foresight before a time when the phrase existed.  The problem is that it’s not true. The archive of the New College website refutes it in several ways.

However the general theme of the story has historical merit and  on this site there was mention that “oaks in the New Forest (in the UK) are a battleship factory.” This led me to some further research.  It turns out that this has much more substance to it as referenced on the history of the New Forest here:

1698 Enclosure Act “For the Increase and Preservation of Timber in the New Forest” : William III needed timber for the Navy. The Act permitted immediate planting of 2,000 acres, and a further 200 acres/annum for 20 years. In 1776 under George III a further 2,044 acres were planted.

However the foresight behind the continued planting of oaks was flawed and failed to take into account a technology development : iron ships.  This development in ship building meant that oaks were no longer in demand.

In an ironic twist however in World War II some oaks from the forest were used to build minesweepers as wooden hulls would not cause magnetic mines to detonate when the ship passed overhead.