The North Haaga Snake-branch Spruce

Most snake-branch spruces stay under 15 metres for their entire lives, a natural size limit built into the mutation that gives the variety its name, unbranched whip-like limbs that hang rather than spread. The specimen in this Pohjois-Haaga park broke that ceiling by a wide margin, reaching past 25 metres, taller than almost anything else planted in the form anywhere. Picea abies f. virgata is a genuine oddity of Norway spruce, a natural mutant first identified in the 19th century and prized ever since for looking almost nothing like a normal spruce: instead of the usual dense pyramid of branches, its limbs run long, bare and snakelike straight off the trunk, drooping rather than climbing. Helsinki protected this one as a natural monument in 1956, and by the city's own 2003 measurements its trunk had reached 164 centimetres around, respectable for the form though its real distinction is height rather than girth. It stands in an ordinary residential park between two streets, easy to walk straight past if you do not already know that an otherwise normal spruce silhouette should not, on closer look, have branches quite this strange.