The Oak of Skåde

Danish protection orders normally cover coastlines, moors and the ground around churches. In 1965 one was placed on a single oak at the side of Elmehøjvej. The national register of protected sites still carries it, with directions that end by telling you the oak stands on the left of the road. It is not a giant by the standards of protected oaks elsewhere in Europe. A surveyor put it at 16 metres tall and 3.76 metres round in 2019, alive and in good order. Nobody has dated it. An open-grown pedunculate oak takes a long time to lay down that much trunk, which points at something between one and a half and two and a half centuries, but that is arithmetic rather than a record, and no source gives a planting year. The protection date is the more useful number. In 1965 somebody in Skåde thought a roadside tree was worth writing into law, at a time when the suburb around it was filling in, and sixty years later it is still at the kerb. That is not how most roadside oaks end up. Stand at the verge and look at the crown rather than the trunk. A tree grown in the open spreads sideways because nothing has ever crowded it out of the light, and this one has had all the room it wanted.