The Seurasaari Anthill Pine

An anthill lives in this pine. It began at the roots and worked its way up into the cracks in the bark, and about five metres above the ground a birch seedling has taken hold in a hole in the trunk. That is a lot of tenants for one tree. Helsinki's city board protected it on 16 February 1956, by its own decision rather than under the national conservation act, which is the unusual half of its paperwork. The base of the trunk measured 280 centimetres round that year. By the 2003 survey it had reached 307 and the tree stood around twenty metres tall, and the city's register calls it the second thickest unbranched pine in Greater Helsinki. It stands in the yard behind the Yusupoff stable, a building put up in 1842 and carted onto Seurasaari in 1916. So the pine has spent a century in a courtyard with a transplanted stable while the open-air museum assembled the rest of old Finland around it, one relocated building at a time. Almost everything a visitor sees on Seurasaari was carried there from somewhere else in the country; the pine is one of the few things that grew where it stands. Two gaps worth saying out loud. Nobody has published an age for it, and those 2003 figures are the newest anyone has taken. If you get out to the island and find it in good health, tell us.