Aukštasis Oak

Nobody agrees on how tall the tallest tree in Plunge Manor Park is. The state register of protected areas says 30.5 metres. A State Forest Service survey in 2016 made it 33. The park's own visitor trail page prints 27.2. All three are measuring the same oak, which is called Aukstasis, the Tall One, because it out-tops everything else growing here. The girth is less contested, 4.45 metres at chest height. The 2016 survey also recorded what a height figure hides: a split down the trunk where lightning went through, a cavity four metres long and a metre across on the north-west side, thick dead limbs snapped off eight or nine metres up, and a crown about three quarters filled. This is a tree that has been hit and carried on growing. It stands in the north-western corner of the park beside a small pond, where a path comes in off Parko gatve, about 60 metres north of the Mykolas Oginskis Linden and roughly half a kilometre west of the Perkunas Oak. Lithuania listed it as a state-protected botanical heritage object in 2016, the same year as the Oginskis Linden and the Laikrodine Oak, which is how one manor park ends up with four separately named protected trees on a single walk. The listing records its size and its condition and says nothing at all about its age. Nobody else has dated it either, so if you have seen a figure, tell us.