The South Oak of the Warande

The Warande is older than any tree standing in it. The park took its present shape in 1757, and the oldest plantings anyone can still point to date from 1834, which means the first eighty years of it have gone. This oak belongs to the generation that replaced them. The national register puts it in the 1850s and calls it one of the few specimens left from the mid nineteenth century layout of the park. It gets a coordinate of its own rather than being counted into the stand around it. That generation is thinning. In 2018 one of its contemporaries came down elsewhere in the same park, an oak grown from an acorn around 1865 and about 150 years old when it fell. Oak is the dominant tree here and it was planted in straight lanes, which is what the nineteenth century did with a wood: rows you can see down, so a walker always has a view of something. One warning the register hands over itself. This tree is marked as not visible from a path. It stands inside the stand rather than along the edge of it, so reaching it means stepping off the lane and in among the trunks. The park is free and open at all hours, and the small zoo inside it is free as well.