Vainiai, a hamlet in Jonava district, maps three trees: a white poplar among the largest recorded in Lithuania, standing in the overgrown remains of a former manor park, and two oaks 26 to 28 kilometres away near the Nevezis river, the Galiunas Oak and the two-trunked Nevezio Dvilypis Oak, 4.4 kilometres apart from each other. The poplar was declared a nature monument in 1960 and has outlived the manor around it by decades; a dedicated footpath still leads visitors to it from the road. Vainiai is the nearest place we publish to all three, not a shared neighbourhood.
0 / 3 visitadas em Vainiai
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Vainiai Poplar
White Poplar (Populus alba) · not documented · Vainiai, Jonava district
The manor is gone and its park has gone back to scrub, and the poplar is still standing in the middle of it: 6.85 metres around at chest height, 35.5 metres tall, among the largest white poplars recorded in Lithuania. Poplars grow fast and are rarely left alone long enough to reach anything like this size, which is most of the reason this one is protected. It was declared a nature monument in 1960 and reconfirmed as a state-protected natural landscape object in 1999.
Nobody has put an age on it, and we are not going to derive one. White poplar growth rates vary too widely for a trunk measurement to be read backwards into years with any honesty. If a record exists somewhere in the Jonava district archives, or somebody has counted rings, tell us and the number goes on the page.
What is left of Vainiai manor park is the sort of place that only survives because nobody got round to clearing it. A footpath leads in from the road to the tree, so the way is obvious once you are there, though getting there means a car: this is open country north of the KK224, a little over a kilometre from the nearest village, in the part of Lithuania where an old estate leaves a poplar behind and not much else.
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Foto: Vilensija (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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Galiūnas Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Kačergiai, Kaunas district
Thirty metres of oak, and you will not see it until you are nearly underneath it. The Lithuanian description is blunt about that: not visible from a distance. It grows in a damp corner of deciduous forest behind dense shrubs, and the screen holds until the last few steps.
The trunk is 4.90 metres round at chest height, sound rather than hollow, under thick corky bark, and it divides into two separate stems 3.4 metres up. There are small animal burrows in the ground among the roots. Kaunas district protects it, and the state cadastre registered it on 29 December 2010.
No age is on record anywhere. Nothing in the sources offers one and we are not going to reverse a girth into years to fill the gap. If a forestry survey has dated it, tell us.
The distance is the other thing to be plain about. This oak sits 26 kilometres from the Vainiai Poplar in a straight line and further by road. Vainiai is the nearest place we publish rather than a neighbour, and there is no public transport to either. From road RK1916 it is a 1.3 kilometre field track to a small wood, then about 100 metres in through the undergrowth, and that last stretch is a search rather than a path.
The Nevėžio Dvilypis Oak stands 4.4 kilometres away, which is how the drive out earns two trees instead of one.
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Nevėžio Dvilypis Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 300 years · Pakapiai, Kaunas district
Banned books were hidden at the foot of this oak. Through the decades of the press ban, when Lithuanian-language books were illegal, the knygnešiai who smuggled them are said to have stashed them here and in the village of Dasiūnai nearby. That comes from one local history of Babtai rather than from several sources, which is worth saying plainly, and it fits the geography: a lone oak in an open field, 1.5 kilometres down a gravel track off the road.
Dvilypis means double-bodied, and that is the shape of it. Two trunks leave one base about a metre above the ground. It is 17 metres tall and 2.6 metres round, the slighter of the two trees on this page, and it still holds the horizon, because it is the only thing standing in that field. Its age is given as about 300 years by the source, and it stays where the source put it.
It sits roughly 120 metres south of the Nevėžis river valley. The Paliepiai Poplar, another registered tree, stands a kilometre northwest across the river.
There is no public transport. It is a car to road RK1906 and then the gravel track, and the field is working farmland with no marked path and nothing saying keep out. The Vainiai Poplar is 27.6 kilometres away in a straight line, so it is not a neighbour of this tree. The Galiūnas Oak, 4.4 kilometres off, is.
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