Ekerö is an island municipality in Lake Mälaren west of Stockholm, and it holds the largest deciduous tree in Sweden. Ekebyhovseken stands alone in the open meadow below Ekebyhov Castle: roughly 84 cubic metres of oak, 10.5 metres round at chest height and only 17 metres tall, because nearly all of it is trunk. It is also the thickest oak in Stockholm County, protected as a natural monument since 1956, and hollow enough that nobody has ever been able to count its rings. The castle park is open all year and costs nothing.
0 / 1 in Ekerö besucht
Foto: Holger.Ellgaard (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
Ekebyhovseken
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 500 years · Ekerö
Sweden's largest deciduous tree by volume is only 17 metres tall.
Almost all of Ekebyhovseken is trunk. About 84 cubic metres of oak stand in the meadow below Ekebyhov Castle on the island of Ekerö, on a stem 10.5 metres round in Swedish Wikipedia's measurement and nearer 11 metres in the local paper Mitt i. The two figures differ by about fifteen centimetres and nobody has reconciled them. It is the thickest oak in Stockholm County and the largest living broadleaf in the country. The crown above that trunk is damaged and thinned, and the tree was very likely taller once.
Nobody has counted its rings and nobody is going to. An oak this old is hollow, the heartwood long since given up, and there is no centre left to read. Both sources give the age as approximately 500 years and both say plainly that the figure is an estimate rather than a count, which is why the range here runs from 400 to 600 and stays that wide.
Sweden made it a protected natural monument in 1956. Getting to it is the price of it: an hour or more from central Stockholm by bus via Brommaplan, then a quarter of an hour on foot from Ekerö centrum, into an open meadow where the biggest broadleaf in the country stands by itself. If you have put a tape around it yourself, tell us which girth is right.
Mehr lesen und Anfahrt →