The Downy Oak of Su Fundale

This oak is one of more than two hundred. At Su Fundale, high in the mountains of Ogliastra, a wood of downy oaks runs for 25 to 30 hectares, and every trunk in it is about a metre across or more. The botanist Ignazio Camarda, who catalogued Sardinia's great trees in 2020, calls it an extraordinary sequence of big trees, with unusual bases and roots often half bare above the ground. Many carry the marks of lightning, some have dead tops, others full and healthy crowns. This is the one Italy's national register of monumental trees lists by itself: 6.4 metres round and 19 metres tall, at about 930 metres up. Camarda puts its age at 300 to 400 years. For the wood as a whole he reads 400 to 500 years from the size of fallen and cut stumps and from growth rings only a few millimetres wide. A holm oak 5.25 metres round, also on the register, stands about 50 metres away. Holm oak forest closes the wood in to the south and heath to the north, and among the oaks grow wild pear, prickly juniper and the rarer Montpellier maple. The provincial road towards Talana runs straight through the stand, so these trees are a stop on the drive rather than a hike: where the road crosses the wood, the trunks are all around you.