The Virginia Oak of the Botanic Garden

This oak keeps its leaves through winter, and its timber was once worth more to a navy than to a carpenter. Quercus virginiana grows along the American south coast from Virginia to Texas, evergreen and exceptionally dense, and shipwrights sought it out for the curved frames of wooden warships because the natural bends of the wood already matched the shape of a hull. In its own range it feeds people as well. The acorns can be pressed for oil, and the roots swell into edible tubers. Valencia's specimen stands near the entrance of the university's botanic garden, which makes it one of the first trees you pass and one of the easiest to walk straight past. The register gives it a girth of 3.69 metres, a height of 32.6 metres and a crown 20.1 metres across. That is a tall, upright figure for a species better known in Georgia and Louisiana for going sideways, throwing horizontal limbs out over a road until they touch the ground. Its age is not recorded. The garden has stood on this ground since 1802, the old Huerto de Tramoieres outside the medieval wall, which sets a ceiling and nothing more. Neither the register nor the garden's own writers put a year on this tree. If you know one, tell us. Entry to the garden is paid, a modest fee that covers the whole collection.