The Cork Oak of the Lago Grande

Portugal's national tree gets one entry in a forest built to show off everything else. Quercus suber, the cork oak, is the species the country names much of its rural economy after: cork bark is stripped from living trunks every nine years or so without killing the tree, and most of the world's supply still comes from Portuguese hillsides. Here, on the south slope above the Lago Grande, it stands quietly among cypresses from Mexico, redwoods from California and a eucalyptus that ranks among the tallest trees in Europe, four metres and a quarter around the trunk and seventeen and a half metres tall, its thick, deeply fissured bark visibly different from every conifer around it. The register gives no age, which for a cork oak is not unusual: old specimens can run past three centuries and nobody has cored this one to count the rings. What identifies it beyond the bare register entry is the species itself: Wikipedia's account of the forest's surviving native cover names oak among its few original inhabitants, the same corroboration the pedunculate oak by the Capela de Sao Pedro carries. Stand here and you are looking at the one tree in this collection that needed no ship to arrive.