The Silver Fir by Moesgård's Small Cemetery

Forty and a half metres of silver fir stand at the far edge of Moesgård's park, over a graveyard that belongs to a family rather than a parish. The burial ground was begun in 1870 by the Dahls, who then owned the manor, walled with a low stone fence and screened by planting. In 1926 fourteen graves were moved into it from Søndre Kirkegård in Aarhus when that cemetery was cleared. The fir stands beside them. The height is the point. A surveyor recorded it in March 2022 at 40.5 metres, 3.91 metres round, alive and healthy. That is a serious size for Abies alba anywhere, and an unusual one in Denmark, where the species is a planted guest from the mountains of central Europe rather than a native. No source records its age. The register leaves the field empty, and so does this page. Silver fir carries its cones upright on the upper branches, standing on the limbs like candles, and they fall apart scale by scale where they grow instead of dropping whole. You will not find one intact on the ground under this tree, however long you look. The compensation is that everything worth seeing is forty metres over your head, which is a fair excuse to stand still for a while in a quiet corner of the park.