The Tali Manor Oak

Finland's second-thickest oak grows behind a golf clubhouse, which is either an odd place for a national record or exactly where you would expect one, since golf courses are where old estate trees survive by accident. The oak's girth has been measured twice, 56 years apart: 440 centimetres in 1957, 616 by 2013, a growth rate that on its own suggests an age reaching back to the 1600s or 1700s, before the manor whose grounds it stands on took its current shape. Talin kartano, Tali Manor, gave its land to golf in 1932, when Helsinki Golf Club built Finland's oldest course here, and the oak simply stayed put through nine decades of fairways being routed and rerouted around it. It has never been core-sampled, so its age is inference from thickness rather than a counted ring, and this entry treats it that way rather than pretending to more precision than anyone actually has. The tree stands close to the clubhouse rather than out on the playing holes, reachable on the estate's public paths without crossing a fairway, though checking in at the clubhouse first is the considerate way to go looking for it.