Munch-eika

Oslo's own city-planning office names this oak the city's oldest tree, roughly 500 to 600 years old with a trunk about eight metres around, growing in the Montebello area on the city's west side. Its name almost certainly points to Edvard Munch, whose home and studio at nearby Ekely stood a short walk from here for the last decades of his life, though the exact naming story is not documented anywhere this project could confirm, only the coincidence of the painter's name and the neighbourhood. What is documented is the oak's remarkable persistence. A tree with this trunk girth would have already been mature when Christiania, as Oslo was then called, was still a modest fortified trading town centuries away from the industrial and cultural boom that eventually brought artists like Munch to its western suburbs. Oslo's municipal magazine on street trees uses the Munch-eika as its lead example of what the city stands to lose when old trees go untended, a reminder that a tree with five centuries behind it can still be brought down by root damage, soil compaction or simple neglect in a matter of years rather than centuries. It survives today as one of very few individual trees in Oslo old enough to predate the city's written records of its own tree population.