The Cornwall Park Algerian Oak

There is a fence around this oak, and it is not there to keep you off the tree. It is there to keep feet off the roots. Cornwall Park has closed the root zone and let the canopy come down to ground level, so New Zealand's national champion Algerian Oak stands inside a skirt of its own branches, 27.2 metres high with a crown averaging just under 40 metres across. The register scores it 378 on the champion tree scale and rates it among the largest of its species anywhere in the world. The trunk measures 650 centimetres round at 1.15 metres, taken below the branch flare, and it is a single stem rather than a cluster of merged trunks, which is part of why the park calls it one of the best-formed Algerian oaks in the country. Nobody wrote down the day it went in. Cornwall Park puts the planting in the early 1920s, by park staff under Sir James Gunson, then chairman of the park board, which makes it about 106 years old, somewhere between 100 and 110. If you know the exact date, tell us. Someone looked at it in February 2026 and recorded a good full canopy with some leafminer damage. That is the kind of note a tree gets when people are watching it. The park is free, open at all hours, four kilometres from the middle of the city.