The Hartwiss Oak of the Botanic Garden

Most people will never see this oak growing anywhere, including in the countries it comes from. Quercus hartwissiana has a narrow natural range around the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea coast into western Asia, and it is scarce in cultivation. The name honours Nicolai von Hartwiss, the Russian botanist who worked on the plants of that region in the nineteenth century. Valencia has one, and it is not a token specimen. It stands 33.4 metres tall on a trunk 3.06 metres around, with a crown just under 22 metres wide. That is a slim stem carrying a lot of height, the shape of a tree that grew up with close neighbours rather than out in the open. It lives in the Escola Botanica, the teaching collection at the centre of the university's garden, where trees are arranged by botanical family rather than by how they look, and the garden's own catalogue lists it there under the Valencian name Roure d'Hartwiss. That is what a collection like this is for: species you cannot see anywhere else, planted for study and then left alone long enough to turn into something worth walking to. Nobody has dated it. The register measures it, the catalogue names it, and neither offers a year or a planting note. If you know when this oak went in, tell us.