The Fulham Palace Oak

This oak survived five centuries partly because people kept attacking it. It was coppiced long ago, cut back hard to its base, a brutal-looking practice that paradoxically resets a tree's age clock and can add centuries to its life rather than shorten it. What grew back is a Holm Oak, an evergreen Mediterranean species that has no business thriving this far north, and quite possibly the oldest specimen of its kind anywhere in Britain. It grows in the grounds of Fulham Palace, for centuries the working home of the Bishop of London rather than a royal estate, and the two bishops most often credited with planting it, Edmund Grindal and John Aylmer, both lived here in the second half of the 16th century, among the first people in England to try growing the species at all. The oak was named among the original 41 trees given Great Tree status in 1988, and a later record corrected an old misidentification of the tree as a common Pedunculate Oak rather than the rarer Mediterranean evergreen it actually is. Fulham Palace Gardens are free to enter daily, which means reaching London's likely oldest holm oak costs nothing but the walk from Putney Bridge station.