The Virginia Oak of 1829

A live oak from the American South has been growing in Pisa since 1829. Quercus virginiana is the tree of Georgia and the Carolinas, the one that carries Spanish moss in photographs; this one carries nothing, stands in a Tuscan university garden, and has been doing so for nearly two centuries. Italy has never quite settled on what to call it. One account lists it as the quercia della Virginia, the Virginia oak. Another, written by a visitor reading the plaques on site, records it as the leccio della Virginia, borrowing the word for holm oak instead. That is a fair slip. Like a holm oak, a live oak holds small leathery leaves through the winter and looks almost nothing like the oaks a European expects to see. It is one of the specimens that stayed put when the Scuola Botanica was rearranged in the late 1800s, along with the plane planted in 1808. Nobody appears to have measured the trunk, so what exists is a planting year and no girth. If you get a tape around it, we would like the number. The beds around it hold other dated arrivals from the same century of collecting, a sequoia from 1868 and an araucaria from 1872 that has reached 25 metres. Pisa was importing the New World a tree at a time, and this oak is one of the earlier receipts.