The Gadeau de Kerville Oak

The oak that made this name famous is not the oak you will meet at the crossroads. The original, several centuries old, was uprooted in the storm that tore through Normandy in December 1999 and left the Foret de Roumare badly knocked about. The name outlived the tree. It passed to a younger sessile oak standing at the same carrefour du Petit Charme, which joined the Rouen metropole's remarkable-tree register in 2019: roughly 120 to 150 years old on the register's own estimate, 26 metres tall, the trunk a little over a metre through at the base. So the panel beside it commemorates a man rather than the wood in front of you. Henri Gadeau de Kerville was a Rouen naturalist who spent four decades from the 1890s onward walking Normandy and writing down its remarkable trees, 113 of them, published through the city's own natural sciences society at a time when nobody catalogued individual trees at all. His oak is gone and his idea is the reason this one is signposted. It stands on the path that circles the mare Epinay, a few minutes' walk from the Petit Charme arboretum car park, on flat ground and free to reach.