Kaunas keeps its oldest trees inside its parks and forests rather than its streets: a linden with a fenced trunk in Vytautas Park; a golden willow leaning over the Nemunas-Neris confluence, now visibly failing; a 600-year-old oak above the Kaunas reservoir, carrying a name once given to a different, already-lost tree; a multi-trunked lime in Vilijampolė; a fused oak-and-pine pair in Dubrava forest on a parish coat of arms; and a newly protected oak at Netoniai. Six trees, several kinds of survival.
0 / 9 visitadas em Kaunas
Foto: Vilensija (CC BY-SA 3.0)
1
Vytautas Park Linden
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · roughly 270 years · Žaliakalnis
Most tree ages on this site are estimates. This one was counted. Somebody bored a core out of the trunk and read the growth rings, which came to about 270 years, so the linden was a seedling here around the 1750s and has stood through every version of Kaunas since.
It measures 5.50 metres around at chest height, 1.73 metres through the trunk, and 23 metres to the top. The crown is 18 metres deep and roughly 25 by 16 metres across, noticeably lopsided; the tree stands on a northwest-facing slope with the ground falling away at twelve degrees. The state register describes its condition as good. There is some wood-boring insect damage in the trunk and one dead skeletal branch, but no rot and no splits in the bark, which for a tree of this age is a better report than most.
The setting is the surprise. This is not a solemn tree in a churchyard: it sits on the slope above Parodos gatvė inside Vytautas Park, at the edge of the Ąžuolynas oak wood, with the fairground close by and a dirt path running three and a half metres from the trunk. Kaunas city council made it a protected natural heritage object on 10 April 2008. It is fenced now, with a board beside it. Twenty-five minutes on foot from the centre, uphill into Žaliakalnis, the green hill.
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2
Santaka Golden Willow
White Willow, golden form (Salix alba subsp. vitellina) · at least 100 years · Senamiestis (Old Town)
A willow with a trunk very nearly seven metres round stood on nobody's list until January 2014, in a public park ten minutes from the Kaunas town hall. The arborist Leonardas Mekionis noticed it. Measured, it came to 6.99 metres at chest height and 21.2 metres tall, the trunk dividing into three about two metres up, with two small hollows. On 8 February 2016 the environment ministry made it a state-protected natural heritage object. It is a golden form of the white willow, named for the colour its branches carry.
Nobody has dated it beyond "at least a hundred years", which is an estimate rather than a count, and willows are short-lived by the standards of the trees on this site.
Which brings up the thing to say plainly: this one may be near the end. A photograph taken in the park in the summer of 2026 is captioned by its own author as a withered, dying willow, and another notes fungus and a trunk full of hollows and cavities. It was still standing in that picture. A plaque in Santaka Park reads, in translation, that old trees and dead wood alike are essential for biodiversity, which reads like a decision already taken about how this tree ends. Go and look at the confluence of the Nemunas and the Neris while you are there, and tell us what state you find it in.
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Foto: Vilensija (CC BY-SA 3.0)
3
Peace Hill Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 600 years · Pažaislis, within Kauno marios regioninis parkas (Kaunas Lagoon Regional Park)
The oldest and thickest tree in Kaunas inherited the job from one that was burned down. The original Peace Hill Oak, about 800 years old and 6.7 metres round, was already failing from storm damage in 2001 when an arsonist got to it. The park left it standing to die rather than felling it, and in that same year the sculptor Juozas Šlivinskas set a metal cross-section of a trunk beside it, its rings marked with dates from Lithuanian history. A second arson attack in 2007 finished the old tree off and it was taken away. A sapling stands on its spot.
The name and the role went, on 25 October 2001, to this oak: a neighbour of roughly 600 years, made a Kaunas natural monument on that date. It measures 5.15 metres round at chest height and 21 metres tall, which makes it the largest and oldest tree both in the city and in the Kaunas Lagoon Regional Park around it.
It gets looked after like a listed building. Internal rot is the ongoing problem, so the trunk is treated and disinfected periodically, damaged openings are covered over and dead branches are cut out. You will find it beside the cycle path through the Pažaislis wood, between the reservoir shore and the Pažaislis monastery, eight or nine kilometres east of the centre.
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4
Lampėdžiai Beauty Linden
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · not documented · Vilijampolė
Four trunks, five crown tops, and by local tradition it began as five lime saplings planted together in one spot. However it got that way, the result measures 7.20 metres around at chest height, which is a coppice measurement rather than one clean trunk, stands 23 metres tall and carries a crown 22 metres deep. Lithuania made it a gamtos paminklas, a nature monument, in 1968, the country's highest tier of protection, and the journal Miškai later put it among the ten most distinctive trees in the land. Locally it is simply Gražuolė, the Beauty.
Its age is an open question and we are not going to invent one. The usual method, girth read against a growth rate for the species, falls apart on a four-stemmed tree, because each trunk may be regrowth of a different age around a much older stool. No source we found gives a figure. If you know of one, or somebody has taken a core, tell us and we will put it on the page.
The state description says it has passed its natural maturity and entered decline, which is a life stage rather than an emergency; it is still listed locally as a place worth going to see. It stands at Romuvos gatvė 57 in Vilijampolė, on the north bank of the Nemunas about four kilometres from central Kaunas.
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5
Dubrava Twins
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) and Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris), grown together as one fused pair · disputed, roughly 100-200 years · Dubrava forest, Samylai (Kaunas district)
An oak and a pine grew into each other at the foot here, and in 2009 the parish of Samylai put the pair on its official coat of arms.
Locally it is told as a love story: an oak that fell for a pine, nobody remembers how the friendship started, and they have not been apart in 150 years. The botanical reading sits in the same sources and is less romantic. The oak most likely germinated beside a pine that was already established and older, grew up hard against its trunk, and pushed burls through the pine bark. Some six or seven metres up the two part again into separate crowns, which happened about a decade before a 2017 account of them.
That reading also unsettles the name. Some assessors treat both as coevals of over 150 years; others give the oak roughly 200 and the pine roughly 100, which would make them anything but twins. Both figures stand in the record and neither has been settled.
At the point where they are fused the pair measures 3.60 metres round. The pine goes up 33 metres, the oak 27.
Neither is in perfect health. By 2017 the pine crown had thinned as rot worked through the join, with carpenter ants visible in the dead wood, and the oak was carrying bracket fungus. Both were alive and standing then.
A 200-metre path and a footbridge lead in from the forest road, and a low wooden fence rings the trunks.
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6
The Netoniai Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Netoniai, near Raudondvaris, Kaunas District
In September 2025 Lithuania added 80 new natural heritage objects to its protected list in a single ministerial order, 49 of them ancient oaks proposed by local communities and their municipalities. This is one of the 49, and it had been standing here for a very long time before anyone in Vilnius wrote it down.
The state cadastre gives it 5.2 metres of girth at chest height and 28 metres of height. That is all the record holds. No newspaper has run a piece on it, no legend has attached itself to it, and nobody has published an age for it, which for a trunk that size is a gap rather than an answer. If somebody has counted or measured anything here, tell us.
The people nearby clearly knew what they had well before the ministry did. A wayside cross stands at the foot of the trunk, the kind that marks a spot locals mean you to notice.
It grows on Jazminų gatvė, which is a gravel farm track rather than a street, in open fields two kilometres west of Raudondvaris and about 800 metres off the Jurbarkas highway, with a homestead beside it. No source states whether you may walk right up to the trunk, so treat it as a tree to see from the track and take anything more as a bonus.
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7
Sitkūnai Forest Oak I
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Sitkūnai, Kaunas district
This oak does not have a name. The state gave it a number instead: Sitkūnai Forest Oak I, with Oak II standing 160 metres away through the trees.
Both arrived on Lithuania's protected list on the same day, 18 June 2026, under one ministerial order that also took in the Kiaunupis Oak a kilometre off. Three oaks, one decree, one small corner of the Babtai forests. The designation is that recent, so beyond the state register and a single Lithuanian reference page almost nothing has been written about any of them. That is a gap rather than a doubt: the register carries the coordinates and the measurements, and the two accounts of this tree agree to within a few metres.
Oak I is the tall one. 28 metres, 4.45 metres round at chest height, and higher up it divides, three stems leaving the trunk two to three metres above the ground and going their own ways. It grows in sparse mixed forest about 200 metres from an isolated homestead, beside the gravel track that runs along the fields, which is as close as any road gets.
No source gives an age. If you know of a survey or a ring count, tell us.
There is no bus. This is 18 kilometres out of Kaunas by car, and once you are parked the three trees are a walk rather than a drive: Oak II at 160 metres, the Kiaunupis Oak at about 900.
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8
Sitkūnai Forest Oak II
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Sitkūnai, Kaunas district
The only photograph of this oak is captioned with the word olos, caves, for the hollows under the base of its trunk. That is what a hollowing oak looks like at ground level: the stem parts company with its own roots and leaves openings underneath it.
Nobody has measured how tall it is. The entry for it carries a question mark where the height should go, which is a fair indication of how much attention this tree has had. What has been measured is the trunk, 4.25 metres round at chest height, making it the narrower of the two Sitkūnai oaks. Oak I stands 160 metres off at 4.45.
The two were protected on the same day, 18 June 2026, under one ministerial order, and the Lithuanian accounts of them treat the pair as a pair rather than promoting either one. That is the right way round. Neither is a famous tree, and the reason to come out here is that there are two of this size in one small wood, with a third a kilometre on.
No age exists for this oak, and we are not going to produce one from a tape measure. If you know of a figure, tell us.
There is no public transport. It is 18 kilometres from central Kaunas by car, then 160 metres on foot from Oak I, with the Kiaunupis Oak 900 metres beyond that.
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9
Kiaunupis Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Sitkūnai, Kaunas district
Of the three oaks Lithuania protected in this corner of forest on one day in June 2026, this is the thickest by a clear metre: 5.50 metres round at chest height, against 4.45 and 4.25 for the Sitkūnai pair.
Its height has never been recorded. Neither has its age. What exists is that trunk measurement, a set of coordinates good to a few metres, and the ministerial order of 18 June 2026 that put it on the state register alongside its two neighbours. That is the whole file. This is a tree that was measured, listed and otherwise left alone, which for an oak is close to the best available outcome.
It grows in Gailiušiai Forest, 30 metres south of a bend in the Kiaunupis stream it takes its name from. The way in is a forest road off the A8 and then roughly 180 metres on foot along a ditch, the sort of walk where a bend in a stream is the landmark you navigate by.
Nobody has dated it. If you have seen a figure on a board or in a forestry survey, tell us and it goes on the page.
There is no bus to any of this. It is 18 kilometres out of central Kaunas by car, and the two Sitkūnai oaks lie 900 metres off through the trees, so all three are one short walk once you have arrived.
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