The Red Oak of Vestre Kirkegård

Most northern red oaks grow up. This one grew out. At 14 metres it is short for its species, and the Danish Tree Register, describing it in April 2019, gives the reason in a few words: it stands free, with a large, broad crown. With nothing crowding it, the tree spent its energy sideways, over a lawn of graves in Vestre Kirkegård. The trunk is 3.44 metres round, which is a good girth for a red oak, a North American species that Danish parks and cemeteries planted for its speed and its autumn colour. The register recorded it as living and healthy, rated it remarkable at municipal level, and noted some water shoots, the thin sprouts an oak throws up from its trunk and limbs. It is not a rarity and it does not pretend to be. It is a plain, generous tree in Copenhagen's largest cemetery, at the south end of the lawn east of the maintenance yard, and it earns the walk in October, when red oaks turn the colour they are named for. The Caucasian oak we map in the same cemetery makes a pair of it: two oaks from two different continents, both a long way from home. Nobody has recorded its age. Nobody has confirmed it standing since the register's 2019 visit either, so if you go, tell us it is still there, and if you know when it was planted, tell us that too.