The Hungarian Oak of Bispebjerg Kirkegard

Four metres nineteen of oak, and the wrong oak entirely. Quercus frainetto belongs to the Balkans and southeastern Europe, to the dry hills of Hungary, Italy and Greece. Somebody planted this one in a Copenhagen cemetery instead, and it has done better than the latitude would suggest: the register measured it in 2017 at 4.19 metres round and 23.5 metres tall, free-standing, full-crowned and healthy. Free-standing matters more than it sounds. Most large city trees are shaped by whatever grew next to them, a lopsided crown, a reach toward the only light on offer. This one had room from the start and grew the shape an oak actually wants, wide and even, which is why it reads as one object from the far side of the lawn rather than as part of an avenue. The leaves settle the identification. A Hungarian oak carries the largest leaves of any European oak, up to twenty centimetres long and cut deep into many lobes, bunched at the ends of the shoots in rosettes. Next to the native pedunculate oaks they look like the same idea drawn at a different scale. Nobody has dated it. It stands about 90 metres northwest of Nordre Kapel, on ground Copenhagen keeps open through daylight hours and uses as parkland.