The Degsnė Forest Larch

The tallest tree in Lithuania is a larch, and it is under two metres round. At 49 metres it beats everything else growing in the country, and the State Protected Areas Service register lists it under exactly that title. It is a demonstration of what larches do with their energy: nearly all of it goes upward. The trunk carries no green branch at all for its first 29 metres, and at chest height it measures 186 centimetres round. Anyone arriving with a churchyard oak in mind is looking for the wrong shape entirely. It did not turn up by accident. The first larches here were planted in 1849, when this was a corner of the Russian Empire, and the stand they grew into is now the tallest forest in Lithuania, averaging around 42 metres. The forest was protected in 1960. This one tree was designated in its own right in 2002, by which point it had stood through two world wars and watched Lithuania become an independent country twice. A survey that year called its condition satisfactory, with the first signs of age on it. No legend attaches to it, which feels right. The record is the story. Getting there takes a car or a bicycle. A gravel forest road runs about three kilometres off the Kaunas to Alytus road north of Balbieriškis, and no bus goes near it.