In Rambynas Regional Park, a single Norway spruce trunk breaks into eighteen separate stems at knee height and climbs together to 32 metres, a branching form specialists say has no known match anywhere in Europe. Local legend calls it the Witch's Spruce, named Lithuania's Tree of the Year in 2017 and reached today by a boardwalk built specifically to bring visitors to it.
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Photo : Lukas Balandis, 15min.lt rubrika „Žalias“ (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Witch's Spruce
Norway Spruce (Picea abies) · roughly 160 to 180 years · Rambynas Regional Park, near Vilkyskiai
One trunk, eighteen stems. The Witch's Spruce rises as a single stem and then, at about knee height, breaks into eighteen separate trunks that climb together to 32 metres. Specialists who have examined it say no other Norway spruce in Lithuania, and none they know of in Europe, grows this way. The five-metre girth is measured at that split rather than at chest height, which is why the figure sounds larger than the tree looks.
Folklore offers two explanations and prefers the first. Witches gathered at the Sidabrakalnis hillfort nearby, the story goes, and stuck their brooms into the young spruce while they went off luring local men. The rival version credits Napoleon, who is said to have slashed the top out of it with his sword in a temper while crossing the Nemunas on the retreat from Russia in 1812. Botanists suspect something duller: that somebody shaped it deliberately, or that early damage did it.
In 1963 the naturalist Eugenija Simkunaite came to see it and, since people were already calling her a witch, suggested they hand the tree over to her once it was felled. It has outlasted her. A storm broke off one of the eighteen stems in November 2007, and in 2017 foresters rebuilt the soil around its roots with sawdust carrying mycorrhizal fungi and fenced the ground off. Lithuania voted it Tree of the Year the same year. Its age is put at 160 to 180 years, which is an estimate rather than a count.
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