Zhelevo, the Coral Gable Drive Red Oak

In 2020 Toronto's city council voted to buy a private house on Coral Gable Drive, not to live in it, but to tear it down and save the oak growing beside it. Locals call the tree Zhelevo, after a Macedonian village, and more than 1,300 donors helped fund the years-long campaign that got the city to act before a developer could. The oak predates the city itself. At roughly three centuries old, it stood here before European settlement reached the Humber River in 1793, part of an oak savannah that once lined the old Toronto Carrying Place trail between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe. Its trunk runs nearly five metres round and its crown, at 24 metres, used to dwarf the house that stood beside it. That house is gone now. The city is building a public parkette on the lot, due to open in spring 2027, and until then the oak is visible from the street rather than walk-up, towering over a construction site instead of a front lawn. It has already survived roughly three hundred years of whatever Toronto threw at it. A couple more waiting for a gate to open is nothing.