The King's Oak

A Swedish king is said to have knelt in the mud here and planted an acorn himself. Tradition holds that Gustav III set this oak in the ground during a visit in the late 1700s, and the district that grew up around it centuries later, Kuninkaantammi, took the tree's name rather than the other way around: king's oak first, neighbourhood second. Whether the royal hand ever touched the sapling is impossible to check now, since no contemporary record survives, only the story passed down through the area's own residents. What is measurable is the tree itself: 404 centimetres around the trunk and 20 metres tall by the city's own 2003 survey, protected as a natural monument since 1956, one of 31 such trees and formations across Helsinki. It stands where the Vantaanjoki river narrows into the Pitkäkoski rapids, on the edge of the long green corridor of Helsinki's Central Park, a spot a king or anyone else might reasonably choose to stop and admire the water. Two and a half centuries on, the oak has outlasted the kingdom that supposedly planted it: Finland left Swedish rule in 1809, a few decades after the tree, if the story holds, first broke the ground.