Trepileegen, the Three-Willow Oak of Dyrehaven

Nobody can explain why an oak this size is named after willows. Trepileegen, the Three-Willow Oak, stands in Jaegersborg Dyrehave among the deer park's cluster of named veterans, and no source found can account for the name it has carried for generations. The gloss is the one the register gives. The reason behind it is gone. The measurement is the solid part. The Danish Tree Register recorded the trunk at 8.90 metres round at chest height in March 2017, on a tree that divides into more than one stem and carries its crown 21.3 metres up. Nobody has dated it, so the age here is arithmetic rather than a record: 8.90 metres round is about 2.83 metres through, and the growth rates used for open-grown oaks put that somewhere between roughly 350 and 550 years. A two-century band is the honest output of that sum, and narrowing it would only be flattery. A Danish hiking account of the park's giant oaks describes the base as stepped, enough that walkers climb onto it. Everything around the tree is open ground: red, sika and fallow deer roam loose across these eleven square kilometres and have grazed under this oak for as long as it has stood here. Getting to it is the long part of the visit, half an hour or more on foot from Klampenborg station, and there is no shorter way in.