The Pontic Oak of the Wilhelminapark

The Dutch national register protects this one for a single stated reason, and the reason is not its age. The field reads dendrologisch. It is on the list for what it is, not for how long it has stood there. Quercus pontica grows wild in one small pocket of northeast Turkey and the western Caucasus, and nowhere else. In Europe it turns up in botanic gardens and specialist collections; a municipal park where anyone can walk up to one on a Tuesday afternoon is an unusual address for it. It also refuses to behave like an oak. It stays low, a big shrub or a small tree rather than a spreading giant, and it comes up on several stems instead of a single trunk, which the register notes in its own form field as meerstammig. The leaves are the giveaway. They are far larger than any native Dutch oak's, stiff, deeply ribbed along parallel veins and saw-toothed round the edge, and held next to a pedunculate oak leaf they look like they belong to different genera. The register's planting band is 1970 to 1980, so the tree is somewhere around fifty, an infant beside the 1898 plantings it shares the park with. No girth figure exists for it in any source we could reach directly. Go for the leaves and for the oddity of finding this species growing in a Dutch park at all, not for the years.