Vorteegen, the Wart Oak of Dyrehaven

This oak is called the Wart Oak, for the wart-like burrs on its bark, and the hiker who walked out to look at them recorded that the tree did not visibly show any. It is worth the walk regardless. Vorteegen stands on a single stem out on the open grassland in Jægersborg Dyrehave, 8.48 metres round and 16.5 metres tall by the register's own legend, measured in March 2017. The headline figures on the same entry, 8.41 metres and 16.8 metres, are the earlier survey: between the two the girth gained seven centimetres and the recorded height lost thirty, which is the ordinary wobble of measuring a living tree from the ground. Nobody has cored it and no planting record exists, so the age is derived. A circumference of 8.48 metres is a trunk roughly 2.7 metres across, and standard growth rates for an oak grown in the open put that between about 325 and 550 years. The open ground is why it looks like this. A tree with nothing crowding it spends its growth sideways, so the trunk is enormous and the crown is only as high as it needs to be. The deer graze around it, free-roaming red, sika and fallow, and the park is free and open every day.