The Cork Oak of the Orangery

This cork oak has been measured twice in three years, and it grew in the interval: 5.00 meters around in October 2021, 5.30 meters by January 2024, still adding girth at an age Italy's national monumental tree registry puts at 226 years. It grows near the Orangery in Rome's Botanical Garden, one of several cork oaks the university lists among its monumental specimens, alongside Turkish oaks and a pair of Himalayan cedars near the old riding school. Quercus suber is farmed across the western Mediterranean for its bark, stripped every decade or so to make wine corks and flooring without killing the tree, and this specimen's deeply fissured, spongy trunk still shows the scars of past harvests even though nobody has stripped it in living memory. It predates the garden's official 1883 founding as a state institution by nearly a century, rooted here since the grounds still belonged to the Corsini family. Visitors tend to walk straight past it toward the garden's showier Japanese section and its cascading fountains, but few trees anywhere in the city are still visibly getting bigger.