Someone has been measuring this tree for half a century, and the numbers are the best thing about it. Sixteen metres in 1973, when the trunk was 85 centimetres round. Eighteen point two in 2004. Nineteen and a half by 2012, and nineteen and a half again in 2021. That series is also the plainest proof that the Great Thuja of Kintai is alive and well, three and a half metres taller than when the first tape went round it. It is a western red cedar, a species from the Pacific coast of North America that only reached European cultivation in 1863, which makes this one an early arrival a long way from home. Lithuanian sources call it the tallest of its kind in the country and hold that the only taller one in Europe stands in Switzerland. Take that second part as the local reckoning it is: widely repeated, and resting on no European survey anyone can point to. Nobody knows when it went in. The tree divides into two stems, so there are no rings to count, and the usual guess ties it to the forestry office beside it, built between 1902 and 1912. No record connects the two. If you know better, tell us. It became a nature monument in 1986 and a protected object of national significance the year after. It stands in open meadow at the edge of the Nemuno Delta, a kilometre along a marked trail from Kintai village. Free, no gate.
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Getting there
Beside the historic Kintai Forestry Office building, Uosto g. 10, Kintai, Šilutė District, Nemuno Delta Regional Park, Lithuania
You can recognise it by its two-stemmed trunk, 19.5 metres tall and 3.2 metres round, the tallest western red cedar in Lithuania. It stands in open meadow beside the historic Kintai Forestry Office building.
Free and genuinely public. Two routes are both described: a marked ~1km forest trail from Kintai Middle School's car park, or the Kintai Forestry Office's own recreational trail; the tree stands in an open meadow beside the forestry building, within Nemuno Delta Regional Park.
No direct public transport to the trailhead; Kintai village itself is reached by regional bus from Šilutė (about 15km) or Klaipėda. Walk in from the village.
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.