Plunge Manor Park, laid out around the Oginskiai Palace, holds four state-protected trees within a few hundred metres of each other: Perkunas Oak, carrying a lightning scar and a thunder-god legend; Aukstasis Oak, the park's tallest; the Mykolas Oginskis Linden, anchoring a ring of planted limes; and the ailing Laikrodine Oak by the old clock-house. Two more stand a drive out of town: the Mingelos Oak, one of Lithuania's thickest, and the Witch's Ash by Lake Plateliai.
0 / 6 visitados en Plunge
1
Perkūnas Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Plunge Manor Park, Plunge
The scar running down this trunk is the reason for the name. Lithuanians call it Perkunas's oak, after the pre-Christian thunder god, and the lightning damage is still there to look at.
Two legends explain how it was struck and neither can be checked. In the first, a vestal named Galinda wept under the oak for a lover who had ridden off against the Teutonic Knights and never came back, and Perkunas hit the tree while she was weeping. In the second, the sacred fire kept on this spot was put out when Samogitia was Christianised, and the god struck in anger at the loss. The ground here is said to have been an alka, a pre-Christian sacred grove.
The documented part is shorter. It is the oldest oak in Plunge Manor Park, 4.86 metres round measured at 0.9 metres, 26 metres tall, protected as a nature monument since 1960 and raised to republican significance in 1987, decades before the park's three other protected trees were listed in 2016. Maria Skuzewska, wife of Duke Mykolas Oginskis, is remembered by old residents for staging plays for children under it, and a sundial once stood behind it above the Babrungas valley.
It is winding down. The crown spreads about 25 metres and carries only around 60 percent of its leaves. Nobody has ever put a number on its age, legend aside, so if you have seen one recorded, tell us. Stop 10 on the park trail, beside the palace.
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2
Aukštasis Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Plunge Manor Park, Plunge
Nobody agrees on how tall the tallest tree in Plunge Manor Park is. The state register of protected areas says 30.5 metres. A State Forest Service survey in 2016 made it 33. The park's own visitor trail page prints 27.2. All three are measuring the same oak, which is called Aukstasis, the Tall One, because it out-tops everything else growing here.
The girth is less contested, 4.45 metres at chest height. The 2016 survey also recorded what a height figure hides: a split down the trunk where lightning went through, a cavity four metres long and a metre across on the north-west side, thick dead limbs snapped off eight or nine metres up, and a crown about three quarters filled. This is a tree that has been hit and carried on growing.
It stands in the north-western corner of the park beside a small pond, where a path comes in off Parko gatve, about 60 metres north of the Mykolas Oginskis Linden and roughly half a kilometre west of the Perkunas Oak. Lithuania listed it as a state-protected botanical heritage object in 2016, the same year as the Oginskis Linden and the Laikrodine Oak, which is how one manor park ends up with four separately named protected trees on a single walk.
The listing records its size and its condition and says nothing at all about its age. Nobody else has dated it either, so if you have seen a figure, tell us.
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3
Mykolas Oginskis Linden
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · not documented · Plunge Manor Park, Plunge
Four old limes and five young ones stand in a ring on the western side of Plunge Manor Park, and this is the tree the ring was built around. The park's records call it the mother of the planting, which makes the recent saplings a restoration of a pattern somebody laid out well over a century ago.
The man it is named for bought the Plunge estate in 1873. Duke Mykolas Oginskis built the park around his palace, and this lime is part of that design rather than a wild survivor the landscaping worked around. Surveys disagree about its size in the usual way: the state register gives 23.6 metres tall and 4.6 metres round at chest height, a 2018 forest service visit made it 27 metres and 4.8 with a sound trunk and a very wide healthy crown, and the park's own trail page prints 21.2 and 4.4.
Limes were planted at Lithuanian homesteads as guardians, on the belief that lightning leaves them alone. The Perkunas Oak, 500 metres east and scarred down one side, has done nothing to support the theory.
Its age is not recorded anywhere. The species can reach five or six centuries, which tells you what a lime is capable of and nothing whatever about this one. It is a large-leaved lime, so it flowers in June, ahead of the small-leaved limes most Lithuanian parks are planted with.
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4
Laikrodinė Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Plunge Manor Park, Plunge
When the tower clock stopped, the estate told the time with a sundial in the flowerbed instead. The gardeners who lived in the clock-house wound the clock's stone weights by hand every few days, and this oak stood against the north face of that building through the whole arrangement. The building is Plunge's public library now and the sundial has gone. The tree is still there, still called the Laikrodine Oak after a clock nobody winds.
It has taken damage. Lightning split the trunk and left a burnt-out crack down it, the main top broke off long ago, and the trunk divides into three stems at about two metres up. A State Forest Service survey in 2016 put the crown at roughly 80 percent, lower limbs pruned, dead wood in the rest. Lithuanian records say straightforwardly that the tree is ailing and waiting for specialist help. It measures 4.7 metres round at chest height and somewhere between 27 and 30 metres tall, depending on which of the three surveys you read, and it was listed as state-protected in 2016 for its size.
Its age has never been recorded. It stands about 200 metres south-east of the Perkunas Oak, the other lightning-struck oak on this walk, at the library end of the park.
A tree in this condition can change fast. If you get to Plunge and it looks better or worse than this, we would like to know.
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Foto: Vilensija (CC BY-SA 3.0)
5
Mingėlos Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 600 to 700 years · Vieštovėnai village, Plungė district
Legend says this oak lost its top after Samogitia was Christianised in 1413 and its sacred oaks had their crowns cut. One version names the man who swung the axe, Mingėla, and has him drowning in the Minija afterwards. Another puts a Christian chapel in the severed crown. None of that is documented, and it is worth repeating anyway, because the tree really is crownless. It has stood hollow and topless for so long that its two sources cannot agree on how tall it is: 13 metres, or 16.
They disagree on the waistline too. Lithuanian Wikipedia measures 8.1 metres at chest height, the arborists who worked on the tree about 7.7, and either figure puts it among the thickest oaks in the country. Estimates give it 600 to 700 years.
The family who look after it are the family it is named for: five generations of Mingėlas on the land beside it. The state protected the oak in 1960 and raised it to nature monument in 2000. By then its trunk was plugged with concrete and strapped with metal bands, the tree surgery of another era. In 2010 the Lithuanian Arboristics Centre took all of that out, replaced it with gentler work, put up a fence and an information board, and grafted its acorns to raise successors. It ran as a candidate in Lithuania's 2024 Tree of the Year vote.
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Foto: Žemaitijos kelias (CC BY-SA 4.0)
6
The Witch's Ash
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · over 200 years · Plateliai, Žemaitija National Park
Lithuania's thickest ash looks like four trees knotted together, and by local tradition it once was. A witch is said to have bound four saplings with her scarf, and the lump on the trunk is where the knot sat. A second version has a woman lured out at night by witches, falling asleep against the tree, and a witch hurling a loaf of bread at it in fury when the roosters crowed. That loaf left the lump. Both are stories rather than history. What is real is the shape: one trunk that reads as several grown into each other, which is where the name Raganos uosis, the Witch's Ash, comes from.
The numbers are 7.41 metres round in a 2016 survey and 7.30 in an earlier one, 32 metres tall, with a crown 27 metres across. Over 200 years old, which is a long life for an ash. It had already passed its natural maturity when a storm in 2008 broke its central trunk, and it carried on regardless.
It grows in the old manor park at Plateliai, on the lake shore inside Žemaitija National Park, and it is a fixed stop on the park's main excursion route rather than something you have to hunt for. The state protected it in 1960 and made it a nature monument in 2000. Plungė is 13.6 kilometres away, so this is a drive, not a walk from town.
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