The Hollow Oak of Overcingel

A fungus usually taken as a sign a tree is dying has been working through this oak's heartwood for decades, and it is still standing. The register calls it zwavelzwam, sulfur polypore, feeding through a cavity that opens the whole north side of the trunk. It grows a short walk from Overcingel's horse chestnut, on the same estate laid out around a manor house of 1777 and remade in the English style by Lucas Pieter Roodbaard in 1824. The register's planting band puts the oak at 1750 to 1800, decades wider than the chestnut's, which makes this the older of the estate's two register trees rather than a companion planted alongside it. Somewhere between 1970 and 1985, tree surgeons patched the trunk with the grafts and braces of that decade's practice. Since then the crown has been cut back hard, from 27 metres to 14, what arborists call veteran pruning: reducing a failing crown to buy the trunk more years. On the south side the tree has grown a thick collar of reaction wood and pushed roots up above the soil, bracing itself against the lean the hollow has left it with. It still leafs out on what remains of its branches. Whether it keeps doing that is a question the register itself leaves open.