The Lucavsala Linden

A rowan grows out of this linden, rooted in the fork where the trunk divides. It is the thickest linden in Riga and among the two or three most voluminous trees of any species in the city, protected as a heritage tree of state significance. Its trunk is also one of the best documented in Latvia. The dendrologist Atis Baiža measured it at 5.34 metres round in 1975. By 2009 the figure was 6.82 metres at 1.2 metres up, a metre and a half added across thirty-four years, which is a tree still working rather than a name on a register. It stands 26 metres tall over a crown covering some 350 square metres. The age is the softest number here. Guntis Eniņš's 2008 survey of Latvia's greatest trees gives approximately 200 years and nobody has tightened it since, so take that loosely. The linden grows on Lucavsala, a Daugava island now held as public forest and crossed by walking trails, and it stands near the monument to the Russian soldiers who fell there in the Great Northern War in 1701. That is roughly a century before this tree existed. It arrived late to its own setting, and has outgrown everything in it since.