Dubrava Twins

An oak and a pine grew into each other at the foot here, and in 2009 the parish of Samylai put the pair on its official coat of arms. Locally it is told as a love story: an oak that fell for a pine, nobody remembers how the friendship started, and they have not been apart in 150 years. The botanical reading sits in the same sources and is less romantic. The oak most likely germinated beside a pine that was already established and older, grew up hard against its trunk, and pushed burls through the pine bark. Some six or seven metres up the two part again into separate crowns, which happened about a decade before a 2017 account of them. That reading also unsettles the name. Some assessors treat both as coevals of over 150 years; others give the oak roughly 200 and the pine roughly 100, which would make them anything but twins. Both figures stand in the record and neither has been settled. At the point where they are fused the pair measures 3.60 metres round. The pine goes up 33 metres, the oak 27. Neither is in perfect health. By 2017 the pine crown had thinned as rot worked through the join, with carpenter ants visible in the dead wood, and the oak was carrying bracket fungus. Both were alive and standing then. A 200-metre path and a footbridge lead in from the forest road, and a low wooden fence rings the trunks.