The Pedunculate Oak of the Capela de Sao Pedro

Almost everything classified in this forest arrived by ship. This oak did not. Quercus robur is one of only two native species on Bucaco's whole list of protected trees, a remnant of the woodland that stood here before the Carmelites arrived in the 1620s and began filling the hillside with cypresses, redwoods and eucalyptus from four continents. Wikipedia's account of the forest names a stand of oak among the survivors of that original cover, which is exactly what this is: not an import chosen for a garden, but a tree the friars found already growing when they built the convent and its wayside chapels. This one stands by the chapel of Sao Pedro on the Via Sacra, four metres ninety around the trunk and twenty-four metres tall, with a crown that reaches almost twenty-one metres across, comfortably the widest native canopy in the collection. The state's 2016 measurement put it at three hundred years, tied with the cypress at the first Via Sacra station for the second oldest tree in the register after the Cedro de Sao Jose, though no source beyond the register dates this individual tree. It is easy to walk past it looking for the exotic specimen and miss the one tree here that was never planted for effect.