Raunkiaer's Oak, the Burnt Oak of Dyrehaven

This oak has a botanist's name on it. Christen C. Raunkiaer, the Danish scientist whose classification of plants by where they carry their buds through winter is still taught, worked on Dyrehaven's ancient oaks, and this one has been called Raunkiaers Eg ever since. The register carries a second name for it as well, Den Braendte Eg, the Burnt Oak, and no source found explains what burned. It was surveyed properly once. N.E. Holten measured it for a study of Denmark's thirty thickest oaks published in the Danish dendrological yearbook in 1998, at 8.20 metres round and 21 metres tall, on a single undivided stem. That is the figure the register still carries, which means the number you are reading is twenty-eight years old and the tree has been adding wood the whole time. It is thicker now than it says here. Nobody has dated it. The 1998 girth is about 2.61 metres through, and the growth rates used for open-grown oaks put that at roughly 325 to 525 years as of that measurement, which is arithmetic rather than a record. It stands between Dalvej and Chausseen in Jaegersborg Dyrehave, among free-roaming red, sika and fallow deer, half an hour and more on foot from Klampenborg station.