Seasons1 of 4
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. It is 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.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Meadow south of Ekebyhovs slott (Ekebyhov Castle), Ekerö
You can recognise it by the trunk, 10.5 metres round under a tree only 17 metres tall; nothing else here is that shape. It stands by itself in the open meadow south of Ekebyhov Castle.
Ekerö centrum, roughly 15 minutes' walk. Public transport from central Stockholm is not fast (bus via Brommaplan, over an hour); this is a day out to Ekerö rather than an in-town stop.
In fruit
October to November: acorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in them
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.