This is the oldest tree the national heritage survey found at Fota, banded to 200 to 300 years, which would put its planting close to when the arboretum's grounds were still ordinary farmland, deca...
Ancient Trees in Fota Arboretum
Cork, Ireland
Fota Island sits at the same latitude as Newfoundland, and the only reason its arboretum can grow a Canary Island date palm and a camphor tree from southern China outdoors is the Gulf Stream, which keeps this stretch of Cork Harbour close to frost-free.
The Smith-Barry family began building the collection here in the 1820s on what had been ordinary farmland, and the national heritage tree survey's oldest find, a holm oak banded to 200 to 300 years, predates that start and would have already been standing when they began. The rest of the collection is younger and stranger: a Campbell's magnolia that covers itself in dinner-plate pink flowers for about ten days each late winter before it leafs at all; a Japanese cedar cultivar whose every needle grows in a tight curl, a Victorian nursery mutation nicknamed Granny's Ringlets; a New Zealand conifer with no true leaves, its flattened stem tissue notched enough to look like celery; and a coast redwood that in its native California would be the tallest tree species on Earth, here still a child of 150 to 200 years next to the two-thousand-year specimens back home. Free to visit, on the same island as Fota Wildlife Park.
In its native range along the California and Oregon coast, Sequoia sempervirens is the tallest tree species on earth, and specimens there run past a hundred metres and two thousand years old.
For about ten days in late winter this tree does something almost nothing else in Ireland can: it covers itself in rose-pink flowers the size of dinner plates while its branches are still completel...
Every needle on this conifer grows in a tight curl instead of lying flat, a Victorian nursery mutation known in the trade as Granny's Ringlets long before anyone wrote down which nursery found it f...
A palm tree growing outdoors on an island in Cork Harbour, at the same latitude as Newfoundland, is the clearest single demonstration of what the Gulf Stream does for this stretch of Irish coast.
Crush a leaf from this tree and it releases the smell the whole species is named for: camphor, the same compound once distilled from it for mothballs, chest rubs and embalming.
This conifer has no true leaves.
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