The Pedunculate Oak of Villa Serra

The park's own notes point out that a pedunculate oak can live five hundred years, which makes this one, at somewhere around 120 to 170, a tree with most of its life still in front of it. It is already 39 and a half metres tall with a trunk 296 centimetres round. Quercus robur is the common oak of northern Europe and the timber that built its navies, and in a sheltered park it grows straighter and faster than it ever does in open country. That is what has happened here: this is a tall forest-shaped oak rather than the wide-limbed field version most people picture when they hear the name. The age is an estimate and not a record. It follows from the founding of Villa Serra's English-style park in the middle of the nineteenth century and from the girth, and no source gives this individual a planting year. It completes the group of four monumental trees standing within sixty metres of each other, alongside a coast redwood, a Turkey oak and a hop-hornbeam, which is more variety than sixty metres of Liguria usually offers. The park is in Comago, in the comune of Sant'Olcese, in the Polcevera valley north of Genoa and outside the city. It is a managed historic park with an admission charge, closed on Monday mornings.