Raunkiaer's Oak, the Burnt Oak of Dyrehaven

This oak carries three names and the most interesting one is unexplained. Beside its formal entry the register lists Den Brændte Eg, the Burnt Oak, and Raunkiærs Eg, after Christen C. Raunkiær, the Danish botanist who classified plants by life-form and who studied Dyrehaven's ancient oaks. What burned, and when, no source we found says. The measurements are dated and unusually solid: 8.20 metres round and 21 metres tall, recorded in 1998 and published in N.E. Holten's survey of the thirty thickest oaks in Denmark in the Danish Dendrological Yearbook. Most trees on this list rest on a register field. This one rests on a printed survey, and it has had nearly thirty growing seasons since, so the trunk is wider now than the number says. The age is derived rather than recorded, as everywhere in this park. A girth of 8.20 metres gives a trunk about 2.6 metres across, which standard growth rates for an open-grown oak put between roughly 325 and 525 years as of that 1998 measurement. It grows on one stem between Dalvej and Chausseen, taller than most of the park's fat old oaks and not much thinner. The deer go where they like and the park is free, open daily.