The Kirjanpuisto Willow

Twenty children once fit inside this willow at the same time, according to local lore, tucked into a hollow trunk that has been slowly swallowing itself for over a century. At 8.4 metres around, it is the thickest tree standing anywhere in Helsinki, a title with real competition from the city's oaks and limes but no serious challenger among willows. The tree was already remarkable enough by 1907 to be documented and photographed, and the city protected it as a natural monument in 1924, decades before Helsinki had any broader system for saving trees at all. Officially it is a crack willow, though residents of Kruununhaka know it by the Finnish name isoriippasalava, the big weeping willow, a name that describes its shape better than its species does. A wooden crutch now props up one of its heaviest limbs, an old-fashioned fix for an old tree that has stopped being able to hold all of itself up. The park around it, Kirjanpuisto, is barely bigger than a city block, wedged between apartment buildings a fifteen-minute walk from Senate Square, easy to miss unless you already know a tree this size is hiding there.