The World’s Tallest Cork Oak: a Cautionary Tale

In August of this year, traditionally a quiet month for news, the UK’s Sunday Times ran a story headed “Record-breaking tree grew from the pages of a 100-year-old-book”. It recounted how a M. Serge Arnaudiès picked up an old travel memoir in the Perpignan flea market in France and found a description of a “magnificent cork oak” (Quercus suber) in Reynès, close to the land in the foothills of the eastern French Pyrenees that his family had farmed since the 17th century.

He wondered whether the tree was still standing, and began searching the land using the description in the book. Eventually he found it, alive and well, in a thicket of hawthorn and brambles. He felt it his duty to ensure the tree’s future, and had a lucky break when he found that a property developer’s plans to build on the site had been dropped. He negotiated to buy the 7.5-acre plot in 1990, a century after the publication of the book that had inspired him. 

Climate change has affected this part of the Pyrenees badly. M. Arnaudiès had been a fruit farmer, growing cherries, peaches, and apricots, but successive worsening droughts and a lack of irrigation facilities led him to grub them up when he retired. Turning his attention to the oak, he cleared the brambles and created a path to it. He decided not to harvest the tree’s cork because he doesn’t want to stress it. It has now become a tourist attraction: parties of schoolchildren and holiday-makers are regular visitors, and couples are said to have become engaged beneath its canopy. 

We might leave this heart-warming story there, but in 2021 M. Arnaudiès read that the world’s tallest cork oak was in Aguas de Moura in southwestern Portugal. The Sobreiro Monumental or Whistler Tree stood at 16.2 m (53 ft 2 in) tall and had been voted European Tree of the Year in 2018. He travelled to see it and, while impressed by it, he was sure that his “Great Oak” was taller. He contacted Guinness World Records, and the organization sent a team to measure his oak. They certified it to be 21 m (68 ft 10 in) tall, so they claim it is the tallest cork oak in the world.

Except that it isn’t. Readers may recall Roderick Cameron’s account, in 2013, of the Anchorena Alcornoque in Parque Anchorena, the country residence of the President of Uruguay. At the time Roderick measured its height as 23.2 m, with a girth of 5.6 m.

The website Monumental Trees records a cork oak with a measured height of 26.80 m along the Route de Saint-Vincent in Tosse, Landes, France. Also in France, in the woods of Sud de Seignosse, a 2023 measurement disclosed a height of 23.80 m for another specimen, while, also in Seignosse, a further cork oak was found to be 23.0 m tall in 2021.

Portugal can lay claim to another famous cork oak, the Sobreiro de Pai Anes in Castelo de Vide, which died some time before January 2014. Whilst it had an impressive claimed girth of 7.28 m, it was out of the running in terms of height, at just 18 m. The same is true of Spain’s Alcornoque de la Corte del Romero in the Picos de Aroche, at 7.5 m by 17 m. It seems to be a feature of Iberian cork oaks that they put on girth at the expense of height.

Meanwhile, the USA can claim a record of 24.6 m, in 2018, for a tree planted in 1879 in the park of what is now the California State Capitol Museum, Sacramento. By the way, for a fascinating account of the cultivation of cork oaks in the USA, see this IOS article by David Taylor and the UC Davis Arboretum website, here.

In Australia, the National Trust claims 21 m (measured in 2010) for a tree in Brighton, Victoria, and 22 m (2010) for “the largest known Cork Oak in Victoria and possibly the largest of its kind in Australia,” growing in the grounds of St. Mary’s Anglican Church, Glen Eira Road, Caulfield, Victoria. The New Zealand Tree Register has a record from 2000 of a 26.0-m tree in Te Awamutu Cemetery, Waikato.

Even the United Kingdom, the climate of which is decidedly suboptimal for a Mediterranean species such as this, can boast a 22-m cork oak (but grafted onto Q. cerris rootstock), at Powderham in South Devon, and a number of 21-m-tall trees, including one at Tregrehan, Cornwall.

So, where in the world is the tallest cork oak? No one knows for sure: the available data suggests that a search of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of south-west France, especially the Landes Department, could pay dividends, while Uruguay, the USA, and Australasia can’t be ruled out.  One thing we can be sure of, sadly, is that it isn’t the tree cared for by M. Arnaudiès, no matter what Guinness World Records and the Sunday Times might claim.

The Sunday Times and Guinness World Records have been approached for comment but have not responded.