The Island's Oldest Pedunculate Oak

This oak is older than the park it stands in. Margaret Island was redeveloped as a landscape park under Archduke Joseph in the 19th century, and a handful of trees on the higher, better-drained eastern strip predate that work as remnants of the oak, ash and elm floodplain forest that covered the ground before anybody designed anything. This pedunculate oak is the island's largest and one of its oldest: FŐKERT's 2020 survey dates it to around 203 years then, so roughly 209 now, and a 1988 measurement put it at 28 to 30 metres tall with a trunk 345 centimetres around. Little of that old forest is left. Around a hundred oaks over ninety years old remain on the island's public land, most of the losses coming from the 2010 flood and the storms of that decade. Its shape records a life spent in a crowd. The crown is asymmetric from growing hemmed in by neighbours, structural limbs were cut back decades ago, and the cavities left by removed branches have recently been treated. Nothing in the record suggests decline, though the most recent condition assessment is the 2020 one. It stands in the Upper Rose Garden beside Zielinszky Szilárd sétány, about 350 metres from the Tree of Science, the Seven Chieftains Plane and the island's black walnut, which together make a loop of under two kilometres.