The North Oak of Strada del Gioco

Downy oak is the tree Umbrian hillsides are made of, and hardly any of them get this big. Quercus pubescens takes the dry limestone slopes that better oaks refuse, usually as a modest, crooked, hard-used tree of field edges and scrub. This one is 430 centimetres around and 21 metres tall, which put it on Italy's national monumental register on size alone. It is not even alone: a second oak within eight centimetres of the same girth stands 150 metres down the lane. Strada del Gioco runs through Prepo, on the slope roughly three kilometres southwest of the walled centre. Perugia's other monumental trees are a nineteenth century story, cedars planted as the city laid out gardens over the ground where the papal fortress had stood. These two are the older landscape showing through: field oaks left where they were while the land around them changed use, which is how a good many large roverelle in central Italy came to survive. The species is worth knowing in winter. Downy oak is marcescent, tending to hold its dead leaves on the lower branches through the cold months instead of dropping them, so the crown keeps a rustling copper brown long after the rest of the hillside has gone bare. Italy's register is the only source that names this tree, and it gives a girth, a height and a position and no age, so the numbers here are the register's own and the pin is marked approximate.