The Oak of Hans Tavsens Park

What the Danish Tree Register admires about this oak is not its size but its shape. The entry calls the crown beautiful and symmetrical, which is an unusual thing for a register to bother writing down, and adds that the trunk carries a neat burl. The size is respectable all the same: 4.62 metres round and 24.5 metres tall, a single pedunculate oak in Hans Tavsens Park in Nørrebro, on the side of the park that faces Assistens Kirkegård. The register recorded it as living and healthy in April 2019 and rates it remarkable at municipal level. Someone photographed a tree within thirty metres of it in November 2024. The park holds a second tree on this map, a field maple about sixty metres away that the same register ranks among the thickest of its species in Denmark. Two different trees and two different species, so you can do both in the time it takes to cross the grass, and then carry on into Assistens next door, where Copenhagen's cemetery trees are the subject of a whole walk of their own. What nobody has written down is how old the oak is. There is no planting date in the register and no estimate. If you know the park's history well enough to say when this tree went in, tell us. Go in winter if you want to see the symmetry the register describes, when the crown is bare and the whole frame of it shows.