The Turkey Oak of the English Garden

In a garden collected out of Australia, the Himalaya and California, this oak grows wild in the hills a few kilometres away. Quercus cerris is native across southern Europe and Asia Minor, and grand gardens of the nineteenth century planted it anyway, because it grows faster than almost any other oak and reaches size while the owner is still alive to see it. This one is thirty-five metres tall with three metres forty-five around the trunk. It is easy to identify once you look down. The acorn cups are covered in long whiskery scales, shaggy as a thistle head, and the acorns take two seasons to ripen instead of one. The leaves are rough to the touch, deeply and irregularly cut, and many of them hang on brown into the winter. What the tree has watched from this spot is the end of a dynasty. The English Garden was Bourbon royal property for its first seventy years, laid out from 1786 and stocked with imports for a queen. In 1860 the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies fell, and the palace and its grounds passed to the House of Savoy and then to the Italian state, which is who charges for the ticket today. The register's hundred and fifty years is an estimate rather than a measurement, so this oak may have arrived just before that change of ownership or just after it.