The Sillim-dong Cork Oak

Legend says this oak grew from a walking stick. General Gang Gam-chan, the Goryeo dynasty commander who crushed a Khitan invasion in 1019, is supposed to have planted his cane here near his birthplace a thousand years ago, and the story is charming enough that it still gets repeated in tourist brochures today. It is also almost certainly not true as stated: when the Cultural Heritage Administration surveyed the tree before designating it a Natural Monument in 1982, its estimated age came out to roughly 250 years, not a thousand. The honest reading is that this is very likely a successor tree grown near a site the legend had already attached itself to, not the original. Set that aside and there is still a genuinely old, sizeable cork oak worth seeing, its bark thick and deeply corked in the way that gives the species its name, standing barely ten metres from the wall of an apartment block that eventually grew up around it rather than the other way round. Its branches reach nearly ten metres east and west, a wide spread for a tree squeezed into residential grounds. It shares its neighborhood with Nakseongdae, the park built around Gang Gam-chan's actual birthplace, so the legend, even if botanically shaky, at least has the right zip code.