The Kaltiņi Oak

Somebody set fire to the inside of this oak three times in 1967. The cavity was sealed the following year and the tree carried on. It has been under state protection since 1977, and in 1981 it survived a second threat, this one accidental: a sewage treatment plant for the care home next door was going up hard against it, until the dendrologist and journalist Guntis Eniņš intervened and the works were moved. By most accounts it is the thickest tree in Riga. Vides Vēstis measured 6.80 metres around in its 2009 survey of the city's greatest trees; Eniņš's book gives 6.85. Five centimetres apart, which is either a year of growth or the honest margin of getting a tape around something this shape. It stands 22 metres tall under a crown of roughly 190 square metres, and its age is put at about 330 years, a soft figure from the same survey. A hollow in the trunk shelters zeltpore, Hapalopilus croceus, a bracket fungus rare enough to be protected across the European Union. The oak first reached print in 1964 and was written about steadily for decades, but nothing recent has appeared, so the last full account of it is more than ten years old. It grows beside Mašēnu Lake on the eastern edge of the city, about 13 kilometres out from the centre and still inside Riga's own boundary.