Laikrodinė Oak

When the tower clock stopped, the estate told the time with a sundial in the flowerbed instead. The gardeners who lived in the clock-house wound the clock's stone weights by hand every few days, and this oak stood against the north face of that building through the whole arrangement. The building is Plunge's public library now and the sundial has gone. The tree is still there, still called the Laikrodine Oak after a clock nobody winds. It has taken damage. Lightning split the trunk and left a burnt-out crack down it, the main top broke off long ago, and the trunk divides into three stems at about two metres up. A State Forest Service survey in 2016 put the crown at roughly 80 percent, lower limbs pruned, dead wood in the rest. Lithuanian records say straightforwardly that the tree is ailing and waiting for specialist help. It measures 4.7 metres round at chest height and somewhere between 27 and 30 metres tall, depending on which of the three surveys you read, and it was listed as state-protected in 2016 for its size. Its age has never been recorded. It stands about 200 metres south-east of the Perkunas Oak, the other lightning-struck oak on this walk, at the library end of the park. A tree in this condition can change fast. If you get to Plunge and it looks better or worse than this, we would like to know.