A long-standing paradigm in ecology holds that herbivore pressure and thus plant defences increase towards lower latitudes. However, recent work has challenged this prediction where studies have found no relationship or opposite trends where herbivory or plant defences increase at higher latitudes. Here we tested for latitudinal variation in herbivory, chemical defences (phenolic compounds), and nutritional traits (phosphorus and nitrogen) in leaves of a long-lived tree species, the English oak Quercus robur. We further investigated...