The Witch's Spruce
How do I find it? You can recognise it by its single trunk splitting into eighteen stems at knee height, 32 metres tall, fenced and reached by a raised boardwalk. It stands in Rambynas Regional Park near Vilkyskiai, Lithuania.
One trunk, eighteen stems. The Witch's Spruce rises as a single stem and then, at about knee height, breaks into eighteen separate trunks that climb together to 32 metres. Specialists who have examined it say no other Norway spruce in Lithuania, and none they know of in Europe, grows this way. The five-metre girth is measured at that split rather than at chest height, which is why the figure sounds larger than the tree looks. Folklore offers two explanations and prefers the first. Witches gathered at the Sidabrakalnis hillfort nearby, the story goes, and stuck their brooms into the young spruce while they went off luring local men. The rival version credits Napoleon, who is said to have slashed the top out of it with his sword in a temper while crossing the Nemunas on the retreat from Russia in 1812. Botanists suspect something duller: that somebody shaped it deliberately, or that early damage did it. In 1963 the naturalist Eugenija Simkunaite came to see it and, since people were already calling her a witch, suggested they hand the tree over to her once it was felled. It has outlasted her. A storm broke off one of the eighteen stems in November 2007, and in 2017 foresters rebuilt the soil around its roots with sawdust carrying mycorrhizal fungi and fenced the ground off. Lithuania voted it Tree of the Year the same year. Its age is put at 160 to 180 years, which is an estimate rather than a count.
- Species
- Norway Spruce (Picea abies)
- Girth
- 5 m
- Location
- Rambynas Regional Park, Silute Forest District, Rambynas forestry block 83 plot 53, about 2 km southeast of Vilkyskiai, Pagegiai municipality, Lithuania (Rambynas Regional Park, near Vilkyskiai)
- Access
- Free. Stands inside Rambynas Regional Park on managed forest/park land, reached by a raised boardwalk from a signposted roadside parking area (the site is explicitly built to be accessible to visitors with disabilities). No fee or restriction found in either source.
- Getting there
- No public transport. By car: from Vilkyskiai take the road toward Sereitlaukis; about 200 m past the town boundary marker (road RK4229) two roadside signs mark 'Lankytina vieta 1.6 km' (point of interest, 1.6 km) and a parking spot 100 m further; from the car park a boardwalk leads roughly 150 m more through forest to the tree.
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Sources
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