Santaka Golden Willow

A willow with a trunk very nearly seven metres round stood on nobody's list until January 2014, in a public park ten minutes from the Kaunas town hall. The arborist Leonardas Mekionis noticed it. Measured, it came to 6.99 metres at chest height and 21.2 metres tall, the trunk dividing into three about two metres up, with two small hollows. On 8 February 2016 the environment ministry made it a state-protected natural heritage object. It is a golden form of the white willow, named for the colour its branches carry. Nobody has dated it beyond "at least a hundred years", which is an estimate rather than a count, and willows are short-lived by the standards of the trees on this site. Which brings up the thing to say plainly: this one may be near the end. A photograph taken in the park in the summer of 2026 is captioned by its own author as a withered, dying willow, and another notes fungus and a trunk full of hollows and cavities. It was still standing in that picture. A plaque in Santaka Park reads, in translation, that old trees and dead wood alike are essential for biodiversity, which reads like a decision already taken about how this tree ends. Go and look at the confluence of the Nemunas and the Neris while you are there, and tell us what state you find it in.