This is a tree, both normal and abnormal. Normal: medium-sized and unsurprising in aspect. Abnormal: very ancient, going back to the Tertiary; and long-lived, often for a couple of centuries, and sometimes for eight.
It is remarkable for its bark, suber in Latin, liège in French and cork in English. Everyone knows cork, this light, insulating material. Light: the word liège in French derives from the Latin levis, with the meaning indeed of “light.” As for the English name cork, it derives from the Latin name for an oak, quercus.
Light, very light: to quote the admirable French writer, Georges Bernanos, in one of his novels (Sous le soleil de Satan, 1930),
La terre brûlait ses gros souliers, l’horizon tournait comme une roue. Il se sentait plus léger qu’un homme de liège, merveilleusement libre et léger, dans l’air élastique.
(The soil burned his big shoes, the horizon spun like a wheel. He felt lighter than a cork man, wonderfully free and light, in the elastic air.)
A cork-tree can be harvested without harm every 10 years or so.
The major producer is Portugal, it boasts forests of cork-oaks covering 736.000 ha (1.8 million acres) in the Alentejo predominantly. Accordingly cork has been a major export of Portugal for many centuries.
A use familiar to everyone is as a stopper for bottles of wine. In my early years, any wine bottle had one made of cork. More recently, it has been replaced by various kinds of plastic. Most people did find out from experiencing unusual difficulty with a corkscrew. Nowadays, cork is found predominantly if not exclusively on bottles of the more expensive wines.
Cork, because of its inner holes, is a superb natural insulator. As a material, cork has many other qualities. It is light and durable, does not oxidize at air, sunlight does not affect it and it is fire-resistant.
As an example, towards the end of the past century, my wife Valerie and I visited Lisbon. A number of shops there sell cork artefacts. In one of them, Valerie chose a purse made of cork. Nowadays, a quarter of a century later, this bolsa de cortiça (cork purse) is as good as new.