Kintai maps one tree: a western red cedar measured every few decades since 1973, still growing, held by Lithuanian sources to be the tallest of its kind in the country and reputedly beaten in Europe only by one tree in Switzerland. Nobody knows exactly when it was planted; the usual guess borrows a date from the forestry office beside it, which is a guess and not a record. Published alone here because the tree is the destination, not because Kintai's research is finished.
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Foto: Kusurija (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Great Thuja of Kintai
Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) · roughly a century (estimate, see notes) · Kintai
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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