The Cork Oak of the Giardino dei Semplici

Every commercial cork oak in Portugal and Spain gets stripped bare every nine years or so, its bark peeled for wine corks and flooring while the tree survives underneath, scarred orange until it heals. Florence's cork oak, planted in 1805 by Ottaviano Targioni Tozzetti in the same botanical garden that grew Micheli's yew, has never once been stripped. Two centuries of undisturbed growth have thickened its bark into a spongy, deeply fissured armour more than four metres around, exactly the texture and thickness that would make a cork harvester elsewhere in the Mediterranean take notice. Left alone for research and teaching rather than product, it has instead grown one of the widest, most theatrical crowns in the Giardino dei Semplici, spreading over 400 square metres of canopy from a single trunk. Targioni Tozzetti directed the garden in the early 1800s, the third generation of a Tuscan dynasty of naturalists, and this tree was one of his additions to a collection built around teaching pharmacy students to recognise plants by sight rather than from a drawing. It stands a short walk from the yew, in a garden that has quietly kept some of the oldest documented specimens of both species in Italy, without either one ever having to earn its keep.