The American Ash of the Largo do Mosteiro

An American ash stands right outside the Loja da Mata, Bucaco's own forest shop, in the Largo do Mosteiro where most visitors start their walk without necessarily looking up. The register measured it in 2016 at 4.65 metres round, 24 metres tall, a canopy 26 metres wide, and gave it a precise age few trees in this forest can claim: 136 years, which puts its planting at 1880, in the decades right after the Bucaco Palace Hotel began rising over the old monastery ruins next door. Fraxinus americana is native to eastern North America, one of the less exotic imports in a forest built almost entirely from foreign curiosities, but the age and the size are what earned it a place in the register regardless of how ordinary the species looks against the redwoods and bunya pines nearby. The Largo do Mosteiro already anchors two of Bucaco's published trees, and this ash simply adds a third specimen to a square most visitors cross without stopping. No second source names this specific tree beyond the forest's own measurement, so it ships flagged rather than doubly confirmed. The register's number, at least, is an unusually precise one.