Two oaks in this grove were dedicated to universities, one to Oxford and one to Aberdeen, and this is the Scottish one. That sentence is close to everything anyone has written down about it. The evidence here is thinner than for its neighbours, and it is worth saying so plainly. A single local website records the dedication and carries a photograph captioned Chêne d'Aberdeen. No second source names the tree, no register gives it a girth or a height, and there is no photograph of it on Wikimedia Commons. What is solidly documented is the grove around it. The série artistique de la Gautrie, in the state forest of Réno-Valdieu, is a stand of sessile oak and beech set aside for how it looks, which France's national forest office says was designated in the reign of Louis XIV and puts at around 350 years; the same local survey that names this oak says 200 to 300 for the series. So: an oak of somewhere between 200 and 350 years, in a grove that is certainly old, with a Scottish name nobody has explained. That last part is the open question, and it is a good one. No source we can find records who made these four dedications, or when, or why a forest in the Orne settled on Aberdeen, Oxford, the British Forestry Commission and a forestry congress. If you know, or if you stand in front of this oak and photograph it, tell us.
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Getting there
Forêt domaniale de Réno-Valdieu, 'série artistique de la Gautrie', near Carrefour Degraine, Feings / Saint-Mard-de-Réno, Orne
You cannot pick this one out by sight and we will not pretend otherwise: it is one of four named oaks of the Gautrie series near the Carrefour Degraine, and the only record of which trunk is one captioned photograph on a local site.
Free, no permission needed. State forest (forêt domaniale de Réno-Valdieu, Parc naturel régional du Perche), part of the 'série artistique de la Gautrie', reached via the 'Les vieux arbres' loop and the Carrefour Degraine. The grove is visited on foot only (bikes are not allowed there).
No public transport to the forest interior; reachable on foot from Carrefour Degraine or the Chartreuse du Val-Dieu trailhead, both car-accessible. Nearest towns are Feings and Saint-Mard-de-Réno.
In fruit
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
