The Kanālmalas Oak

The easiest old tree to reach in Riga is also the one nobody has named. It grows in the Kanālmalas apstādījumi, the ribbon of park that follows the old city canal, a few minutes from the Freedom Monument and the Laima Clock. It is a pedunculate oak, it sits on Latvia's register of protected natural objects, and that is close to the sum of what is written down. A photographer logged it in May 2018 for Wiki Loves Earth, the campaign that documents the country's protected trees, and left a GPS reading taken standing underneath it. That is why the pin here is exact while almost nothing else about the tree is. The setting does the historical work. This canal park is the ceremonial centre of Riga, the ground around the Freedom Monument where the city gathers, and the oak has stood through the whole of it while attracting no attention. Its age is honestly unknown. Latvian public broadcaster LSM once ran a history of these gardens in which the city forestry service mentioned two old oaks that might go back to the time of Georgs Kūfalts, the gardener who laid the park out in the 1880s, which would put them near 140 years. The article names neither tree, so whether this is one of them is a fair guess and no more. Nobody has dated it, taped its girth or published a line about it. If you know which oak this is, or how old, tell us.