One tree carries Turku's whole early history, because it is nearly all that survived it. Kalm's Oak grew from a seed around 1750 into a garden Pehr Kalm, the Turku Academy's first professor of economics and a student of Linnaeus, laid out on the Aura riverbank. The Great Fire of 1827 took the rest of the city and the rest of the garden with it. The oak is still standing, called Turku's oldest tree by the city's own register, on the riverside path a short walk from the Market Square.
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Kalm's Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 275 years (grown from a seed around 1750) · Sibelius Museum / Aura riverbank
The Great Fire of Turku in 1827 took most of the city and it took the botanical garden this oak was planted in. The oak is still standing. It grew from a seed around 1750 and went into the ground on the Piispantalo property in the 1760s, part of the garden Pehr Kalm laid out and directed from 1757. Kalm was the Turku Academy's first professor of economics and a student of Linnaeus, and this tree is effectively the last of his garden.
The city's own tree inventory calls it the oldest tree in Turku. Its surveyors measured it on 10 July 2020 and recorded 4.97 metres round and 17 metres tall, on the bank of the Aura between the river and the Sibelius Museum. In 2012 an environmental artwork called Pehr Kalm Revival was installed near it, tracing the plan of the garden that no longer exists.
Approach from the riverside promenade, a short walk from the Market Square. The tree is clearly visible from the public path and that costs nothing. How close you can actually get depends on where the museum's own garden begins, and that boundary is one we have not established. If you walk it and find out, tell us.
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