U Listincu

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.