The treasure of the island of Montecristo: the surviving holm oaks of the thousand-year-old forest
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More than the one fantasized by Abbot Faria in the novel by Alexander Dumas, the treasure of Monte Cristo they are the last holm oaks. Oaks of the Mediterranean forest that in the past grew on a good part of the island over sixty kilometers from the Tuscan coast. For over fifty years this area has been a fully protected state reserve, meaning it cannot be visited unless accompanied on authorized excursions.
However, the absence of human disturbance has not protected this tree which struggles to reproduce due to the tireless grazing of the island’s goats, a symbol of the natural area and the only population living in Italy in the wild. Today of that original forest remain approx 130 holm oaks distributed in different areas of the reserve. Many are impressive in diameter and there is evidence of giant plants on the island as early as the late 16th century. To verify their exact age, the samples of six Monte Cristo holm oaks were dated with the radiocarbon method and revealed an age between 400 and over 700 years. The results of the study, coordinated by the University of Tuscia and financed by the Carabinieri Biodiversity Group, were recently published in the journal ecology and they also offer some interesting ideas for disassembling some legends about millennial trees.
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The mountain environments in the Mediterranean basin host plants that exceed the threshold of a thousand years, such as the Pollino loricate pine, but in the ecosystems closest to the coast these vegetal highlanders are very rare due to a long history of fires and exploitation of the woods . “There longevity of the holm oaks of Montecristo has opened a new chapter on the seniority that this species can achieve. – explains Gianluca Piovesan of the University of Tuscia – The data show that the evergreen oaks of coastal habitats, in terms of age, compete with those found higher up such as the Aspromonte oaks”.
The holm oak (Quercus ilex) is a tree well adapted to the Mediterranean climate such as that of Montecristo characterized by a prolonged summer drought, incessant winds and mild winter temperatures. It has all the potential to grow old peacefully in a fairly hostile environment. Of course, the holm oaks of Montecristo are certainly not the oldest plants on our coasts: a Phoenician juniper in the Ardèche canyon in southern France it has been recorded 2,500 years. But it’s not a question of rankings.
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Also because in the Mare nostrum there are other sacred monsters with which it is useless to compete. Like the olive tree. It is estimated that some specimens of this species in Sardinia are several thousand years old. “But these are approximations based only on the dimensions of the trunk. – adds the ecologist – The recent radiocarbon dating allows us to say that, to calculate the years of a tree, it is no longer sufficient to measure its diameter”.
Many alleged immortals of the plant world, tested by the particle accelerator, have shown that they are much younger than previously thought. So it was for the most important monumental olive trees from the Spainwhich do not exceed five hundred years, or those present in the Garden of Gethsemanewhich according to legend would be witnesses of the prayer of Jesus Christ but which in all probability were planted around the 12th century.
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To protect the ancient fragments of the Mediterranean forest of Montecristo and promote their natural renewalvarious protective actions are carried out. “The holm oak acorns that grow on the island are harvested both to preserve their genetic heritage and to reproduce them in a controlled environment. – explains John Quilghinicommander of the Carabinieri Department for the biodiversity of Follonica which deals with the safeguarding of Montecristo – To protect the young seedlings from the island goats which consume their shoots, the most important holm oak mother plants of the reserve have been isolated with fences of forty meters in order to leave sufficient space for natural regeneration”.
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There is also a Botanical Garden which houses a floristic collection of the 130 plant species that grow on the island such as Dryopteris tyrrhenaa rare fern, and the herbaceous Scrophularia trifoliataboth endemic to the Tuscan Archipelago and Sardinia.
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