In September 2025 Lithuania added 80 new natural heritage objects to its protected list in a single ministerial order, 49 of them ancient oaks proposed by local communities and their municipalities. This is one of the 49, and it had been standing here for a very long time before anyone in Vilnius wrote it down. The state cadastre gives it 5.2 metres of girth at chest height and 28 metres of height. That is all the record holds. No newspaper has run a piece on it, no legend has attached itself to it, and nobody has published an age for it, which for a trunk that size is a gap rather than an answer. If somebody has counted or measured anything here, tell us. The people nearby clearly knew what they had well before the ministry did. A wayside cross stands at the foot of the trunk, the kind that marks a spot locals mean you to notice. It grows on Jazminų gatvė, which is a gravel farm track rather than a street, in open fields two kilometres west of Raudondvaris and about 800 metres off the Jurbarkas highway, with a homestead beside it. No source states whether you may walk right up to the trunk, so treat it as a tree to see from the track and take anything more as a bonus.
From people who stood here
No notes yet
Did you visit the tree? Leave a note for the next visitor.
Getting there
Jazminų g., Netoniai village, Raudondvaris eldership, Kaunas District, Lithuania
You can recognise it by the wayside cross standing at its foot, 5.2 metres round and 28 metres tall. It stands beside the gravel farm track Jazminu gatve, two kilometres west of Raudondvaris.
Reads as adjoining a private homestead: the tree stands beside a gravel farm track (Jazminų g., OSM-tagged highway=track with no private-access tag), about 0.8 km off the Jurbarkas highway (road 141) and 2 km west of Raudondvaris, next to one of the area's newer homesteads, surrounded by fields and pasture. A wayside cross stands at the trunk, which in Lithuanian tradition usually marks a spot meant to be seen. No source states plainly whether a stranger may walk up to the trunk without asking; the honest caveat for a visitor is that it stands right beside someone's home along a public gravel road, not deep inside a fenced yard.
No public transport; reached by car from the Jurbarkas highway (road 141), turning southwest onto the gravel Aguonų/Jazminų street track toward the Nemunas river, about 0.8 km.
In fruit
September to October: acorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in them
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.