Granit Oak

Worth a detour

A pedunculate oak in a village on the Thracian plain that has been standing since roughly the fourth century AD. Ring counts taken in the early 1980s came to 1,637, putting its germination around the year 345. It is dying now — one great limb still comes into leaf and the rest is dead wood — and that is a reason to go and look at it rather than a reason not to.

Story

Background

The tree stands in Granit, a village on the plain between Plovdiv and Stara Zagora, and it does not announce itself. Measurements taken in the 1980s give a trunk girth of 7.45 metres, a height of 23.4 metres and a crown spreading over roughly a thousand square metres. A botanical probe counted 1,637 annual rings, which dates the seedling to around AD 345 — before the Roman empire had finished splitting in two, and a very long time before there was a Bulgaria.

It is failing now. Most of the crown is dead, and in recent years only one of the great limbs has come into leaf each spring, though it has gone on producing acorns. Whether it recovers is not something anyone can promise: oaks can hold on in this state for decades and can also go over in a single storm.

There is nothing else in Granit and no facility of any kind at the tree. It stands where it stands, in the open, free, and takes about ten minutes to look at properly. Whether that justifies the detour off the Plovdiv–Stara Zagora road is entirely a question of how you feel about very old living things.