The Pedunculate Oak of the Botanical Gardens

This oak is not on Hobart's significant tree register for being large or old. It is listed for how it looks, for being part of a historic garden, and for standing where the landscape would miss it, and the register gives no height, no girth and no age at all. That is an unusual case to make for a tree and it is the honest one here. Hobart's register calls the species English Oak; this page uses Pedunculate Oak, the neutral name for Quercus robur, the same tree under a less proprietary label. It is the oak the British planted wherever they settled, and Tasmania suited it better than most of Australia did: cool, wet and far enough south that an oak can behave the way it does at home instead of merely surviving. In the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens it grows near the main house and glasshouse complex, in a garden founded in 1818 and the second oldest in the country. The Gardens hold more than one English oak, which is worth knowing if you go looking; this is the one the city registered, marked with an arrow on the register's own aerial photograph. Nobody has published a planting date for it, so how old it is remains genuinely open. Entry is free and the gates open at 8am daily.