Pagramantis Regional Park covers 136 square kilometres of the Jura valley in western Lithuania, and its four registered oaks are spread across it rather than gathered in one wood. The one to plan around is the Gudlaukis oak, 6.30 metres round, hollow enough to step inside and still leafing out every year. The other three stand within eight kilometres of it: a healthy giant on the Jura bank at Geniai, a cemetery oak at Tamosaiciai, and an oak on the Akmena valley rim at Andriejaiciai with old crosses at its foot. The park's own cycling route links them.
0 / 5 bezocht in Pagramantis Regional Park
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The Gudlaukis Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 600 years, by long local tradition · Pagramantis Regional Park
You can step through a hole in the side of this oak and stand inside it. The trunk is 6.30 metres round and almost entirely hollow, and it still comes into leaf every year.
What it does not have is height. It stops at 16 metres, short for that bulk, and local tradition blames lightning, repeatedly, for taking the crown off. The same tradition gives the tree more than 600 years. Nobody has counted its rings or worked the figure out from a growth rate, so treat 600 as the village's number rather than a surveyor's. If even half of it holds, this oak was standing through the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian state, both world wars, and fifty years of Soviet rule.
Lithuania made it a state-protected natural heritage object in February 2016, by ministerial order, in the same document that covers the Geniai oak a few kilometres west. The land around it is privately owned and the tree is treated as everybody's: a wooden barrier, an information sign, arrows pointing the way in, and a position directly on the regional park's own cycling and driving route. Both records of it call it one of the most visited natural sights in the park, which for a tree with no crown left is a decent second career.
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The Geniai Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented; comparably-sized Lithuanian oaks run several centuries old · Pagramantis Regional Park
Two and a half kilometres from a hollow, lightning-wrecked oak stands the version that got away with it: the same species, the same park, nearly the same waistline, and no damage at all.
The Geniai oak measures 5.8 metres round in one survey and 5.6 in the other, and reaches 26 metres in the first and 25 in the second. Nobody has reconciled the two, which is what happens when a tree is measured twice, years apart, by people who had no reason to compare notes. The Lithuanian record puts it among the largest oaks in the country, and both records agree it is in vigorous health, which at that girth is the rarer half of the sentence.
It grows about 150 metres back from the right bank of the Jura, reached by a gravel road and then a stretch of meadow, with an information board and arrows to bring you in. Lithuania listed it as a state-protected natural heritage object in February 2016, in the same ministerial order that covers the Gudlaukis oak.
What it does not carry is a date or a legend. No ring count, no planting record, nobody's grandfather stopping here. Oaks this thick in Lithuania generally run to several centuries, but that has never been established for this one. If you know of an age with a source behind it, tell us.
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Foto: Vilensija (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The Tamosaiciai Cemetery Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Pagramantis Regional Park
The thickest oak in Tamosaiciai is not the Tamosaiciai oak. The name belongs to a tree in the old village cemetery, 4.3 metres round and 23 metres tall, which both records of it describe as in complete health, and which both call the real one.
The bigger tree stands out in a field a short walk away and measures 5.8 metres or 6.15 depending on which survey you take. It is also in trouble: storm damage, a large hollow, no information sign, and no place in the register of protected objects. Size is not the whole argument, and in Tamosaiciai the village and the register have both come down on the side of the healthy tree.
So the cemetery oak carries the name. It grows among the graves on the right bank of the Kernusupis stream, about a kilometre southeast of the Balskai dam, inside Pagramantis Regional Park. Burial ground tends to be left alone for centuries at a time, which is why so many of the oldest trees in this part of Europe are standing in it.
Nobody has dated this one. There is no ring count and no planting record, and the two sources that measured it agree on the girth and the height to the centimetre while saying nothing at all about its age. If you know of a figure with a source behind it, tell us.
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Foto: Vilensija (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The Andriejaiciai Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · over 300 years, undocumented exact age · Pagramantis Regional Park
By local telling, the oak that stood here before this one had a hollow big enough to shelter five calves, and Vytautas the Great stopped his retinue under it for a meal on his way through. Both sources repeat the story. Neither offers any evidence for it, and Vytautas died in 1430, so whatever the legend belongs to, it is not the trunk standing here now: both records put this tree at over 300 years, which is an estimate nobody has checked against rings.
What can be measured is agreed on. Five metres round at chest height, give or take ten centimetres, and 26 metres tall, which makes it a tall oak rather than a squat one. It grows on the rim of the Akmena river valley, at the end of a village street called Azuolo gatve, which is Lithuanian for Oak Street.
Old crosses still stand underneath it, left from a small cemetery that once occupied the ground and is otherwise gone. Silale district listed the tree as a protected natural heritage object in 2006.
Read the 300 years as a floor rather than a figure. Nobody has cored it, and the two records that give an age both give the same round number without saying where it came from. If somebody has a dated measurement, we would like to hear it.
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Gaurė Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Gaurė, Tauragė district
Gaurė put this oak on its coat of arms, as the town's symbol of strength. That is a considerable vote of confidence in a tree that is hollow through the middle and has few branches left.
It carries the widest trunk on this page by a margin: 7.10 metres round at chest height, against 6.30 for the Gudlaukis Oak. Height 18.5 metres, so for all that girth it is a short, heavy tree rather than a tall one. The trunk is hollowed and thickly grown over with lichen and fungi, and a photograph from 2021 still shows it green. The Lithuanian description of it is vigorous, and looking at the state of the bark, that word is doing real work.
It has been protected since 1960, by an order of the Lithuanian nature protection committee of the day, and it is signposted from the road with an information board kept up beside it, which in a village this size says something about local priorities. It stands on the slope edge between the main street and the Įkojis stream, beside an old homestead, about 300 metres from the church.
No source gives an age, and a hollow trunk is the hardest kind to date honestly. If a figure exists in the Tauragė forestry records, tell us.
Getting there means a car. The park's other four trees are 18 to 19 kilometres off, a separate stop rather than part of the same loop.
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