Skarseken

Goteborgs-Posten calls this the only giant tree in Gothenburg with a plot of its own, and it means that literally: Skar 751:93 is a parcel of land that exists for an oak rather than for a building. On 14 October 2025 the city made the arrangement formal and declared the tree a naturminne, a nature monument, one of four oaks in Orgryte designated that day. Giant tree is a category here rather than a compliment. The county board of Vastra Gotaland applies it to trunks more than a metre through, and it rates this one sarskilt skyddsvart, specially worth protecting, standing inside an area the county has singled out for exactly such trees. Skarseken is a gransek, a boundary oak. Before the 1800s the farms out here, Garda and Stora Torp among them, marked their lines with trees instead of fences, and the oaks outlived the boundaries, then the farms, then the fields themselves. The city arrived, the streets bent around them, and the lines they hold are now nobody's. The city puts the four somewhere between 300 and 500 years old. No girth has ever been published for this one. If you bring a tape measure, we would like the number.