In August 2010 a storm broke a single branch off this oak that measured 3.3 metres around on its own; a month later the tree carried the label Arbre remarquable de France. It stands alone on an old airial, a forest clearing where Landes farmers once built their houses, at the end of a kilometre of pine forestry track from the hamlet of Nerthe. Free to reach on foot, somewhere between 500 and 700 years old, and nobody has cored it to settle the number.
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写真：Blef00fr (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Oak of Nerthe (Chêne de Nerthe)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 600 years · Nerthe, Magescq, Landes
In August 2010 this oak shed a single branch that measured 3.3 metres around. A month later, on 18 September, the A.R.B.R.E.S. association hung an Arbre Remarquable de France label on what was left: 6.50 metres of trunk at chest height, under a crown 27 metres up.
It grew up alone. The oak stands on an airial, one of the clearings where Landes farmers built their houses among the pines, and the farm here is ruins. The nearest occupied house is two or three kilometres off down a forestry track. For most of its life its only visitors were whoever happened along that track, joggers and hikers and mountain bikers, and nobody wrote any of it down until the label arrived.
Its age is an argument nobody has settled. Local tradition says 600 years, the official label rounds that up to 600 or 700, and growth-rate calculations worked from the girth come out lower, at 500 to 600. Nobody has cored it, so the honest answer is somewhere in the 500 to 700 range.
After the branch came down, visitors reported the wound being dressed with tar, and they kept coming. Four separate hiking platforms now publish routes out to it, the newest of them from 2023. The last kilometre is on foot, which is a good part of why it stayed unknown for so long.
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