Ghisonaccia sits on the eastern plain of Corsica, and it holds two French Tree of the Year winners within a kilometre and a half of each other. The Arburacellu, a cork oak of roughly 200 to 250 years, grew bark outgrowths that read, from the right angle, as a bird of prey; the public voted it tree of the year in 2018. U Listincu is far older, a mastic reckoned at 700 to 1,000 years, rooted in the stonework of a Roman ruin, national winner in 2011. Both stand near the hamlet of Gattone, free to visit.
0 / 2 visités à Ghisonaccia
Photo : Pierre Huchette (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Arburacellu (the Bird Tree)
Cork Oak (Quercus suber) · 200 to 250 years · Gattone, rural Corse Orientale plain
Two people out picking wild asparagus found this tree in 2017. A year later, France voted it the country's tree of the year.
What they walked into is a cork oak of roughly 200 to 250 years, fifteen metres tall and four metres round, shaped like a bird. Lightning is the likely explanation: a strike disrupts the flow of sap, the cork bark grows back wrong, and here it grew into three outgrowths that from the right angle read as a raptor with its head raised and its wings spread. Fire reached it at some point too. The core is burnt and hollow.
The man who found it, out foraging with his granddaughter, took it to the person who had already had Ghisonaccia's other old tree, a mastic reckoned at a thousand years, officially recognised. The oak was entered in the 2018 Arbre de l'Année, run by Terre Sauvage and the national forestry office, and took the public prize with 3,053 votes of more than 12,000 cast. The following year it came fourth in European Tree of the Year, with 29,140 votes of 311,772.
So it is famous for its shape rather than its age, and famous only since a vote, which is rarer still. It stands beside a rural lane on the eastern Corsican plain near Gattone, and people now drive out specifically to find the angle where the bird appears.
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Photo : Terre Sauvage (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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U Listincu
Mastic Tree (Pistacia lentiscus) · 700 to 1000 years · Gattone plain, Ghisonaccia
Mastic is a shrub. Along most of the Mediterranean it grows waist-high, gets browsed by goats and is known mainly for the resin it bleeds. This one is a tree, reckoned at somewhere between 700 and 1,000 years old, and one of only about fifty ancient lentiscs known across the whole basin.
It grows out of a ruin. The roots have taken hold in the stonework of a Roman-era structure on the Gattone plain, south of the village, and worked their way through it. The age is an estimate rather than a ring count, and no source records a measured circumference, so if you have put a tape around it we would like to hear the number.
France caught up with it in 2011, when it won the national Tree of the Year vote run by Terre Sauvage and the forestry office, and in 2012 it was labelled an Arbre remarquable de France. The cork oak in the next fields over, the Arburacellu, took the same prize seven years later. Two national winners inside a kilometre and a half of each other, on one stretch of eastern Corsican farmland.
It now stands in a fenced enclosure with a gate left open for visitors, reached on a signed route from the village: roughly two kilometres by bike, four on foot through the orchards. The same circuit runs on to the oak, so the pair make one afternoon.
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