The Pedunculate Oak of Frederiksberg Have

This oak has no recorded birthday, but the garden gives it a ceiling. Frederiksberg Have was laid out as royal ground around 1700 and rebuilt between 1798 and 1804 into the romantic landscape park it still is, so whatever the tree's exact age, it cannot be older than the garden that had to exist before anyone planted in it. What was measured rather than guessed: 4.95 metres round, 28.8 metres tall, 1.58 metres through, surveyed by the Danish Dendrological Society in October 2016 and rated municipally noteworthy. That is the thickest trunk in our Copenhagen list. The 130 to 250 years on this page is arithmetic on that girth against how fast a parkland oak puts on wood, not a date from any record, and it should be read as the wide guess it is. A pedunculate oak growing in the open with room on every side thickens faster than one shut into a wood, which is exactly the situation here, and one reason the upper end of that range is probably generous. The garden around it is public, protected and busy: lawns, canals, the palace up on its hill, boats in summer. The oak has watched the whole thing turn from a royal retreat into the city's back garden.