Vorteegen, the Wart Oak of Dyrehaven

The Wart Oak may have lost its warts. Vorteegen is named for the wart-like burrs that grow on an old oak's bark, and a Danish walker who went out to find the park's named giants reported standing in front of this one and not seeing them. Either they have been shed, or they are less obvious than the name promises, or he was looking at the wrong part of a very large tree. Go and settle it. The rest is measured. In March 2017 the Danish Tree Register recorded the trunk at 8.48 metres round and the tree at 16.5 metres tall, on a single stem that does not divide, which sets it apart from several of the other named oaks here. It grows out on the open grassland of Jaegersborg Dyrehave rather than in the cluster of veterans further north, so it stands alone with nothing around it but grass and deer. No one has dated it. That girth is roughly 2.70 metres through, and the growth rates used for open-grown oaks put it somewhere between about 325 and 550 years. The number is a calculation, not a record, and the band stays wide on purpose. It is a long walk in from Klampenborg station, across open ground, with red, sika and fallow deer moving freely the whole way.