The Ēbeļmuiža Oak

Riga has spent decades patching this oak with metal sheets and plates, and it is still green. It is the thickest tree in Pārdaugava, the half of the city on the left bank of the Daugava: 5.60 metres around, 20 metres tall, with a crown covering some 250 square metres. Two independent surveys, Guntis Eniņš's 2008 book on Latvia's greatest trees and the environmental magazine Vides Vēstis a year later, report exactly the same girth, which is rarer than it sounds. Eniņš puts the age at about 300 years, a loose figure nobody has narrowed since. The repairs are the real story. The trunk has been worked over again and again, sealed and plated where it gave way, and in 2000 it was given props and a tidied surround. The same 2009 survey that catalogued all that ironmongery also recorded the tree still leafing out and thriving. Nothing appears to have been published on it since, so that remains the last word. It grows in the park of the former Ēbeļmuiža manor in Ziepniekkalns. At roughly three centuries it predates the Latvian republic by two hundred years, and it has stood through the empire, two wars and the Soviet decades on ground that went from private estate to public park around it. Sources give the site two different street addresses, so aim for the park rather than a house number.