The Pedunculate Oak of Palazzo Ducale

This oak, 4.20 metres round and 25 metres tall, stands at the western edge of the grounds around Palazzo Ducale, the summer palace Duke Ottavio Farnese began in 1561 and the building that gives the whole park its name. Farnea, the local name the register uses for Quercus robur, is not one of the species most associated with this park; horse chestnuts, planes and limes dominate the planting record, which makes an oak this size a genuine outlier rather than one of a matching set. Whatever stood on this ground before 1745 is not recorded individually, because the whole park lost its mature trees that year: troops occupying Parma during the War of the Austrian Succession cut and burned every one of them, including those on the park's central ornamental island, to feed their fires. Everything growing in Parco Ducale today, this oak included, is therefore at most a product of the 1749 restoration under Duke Filippo di Borbone and the French architect Petitot, or of the further planting waves that followed through the nineteenth century. Pedunculate oaks live for centuries when left alone, far longer than this one has yet had, which makes it one of the park's trees with the most growing still ahead of it.