What is the oldest tree in Riga?
Riga's oldest tree is the Kaltiņi Oak, estimated at roughly 330 years old, growing beside Mašēnu Lake on the city's eastern edge. Two independent 2008 and 2009 surveys agree closely on its six-metre-plus girth, though neither dates it more precisely than that soft estimate.
The Kaltiņi Oak has survived more than its age suggests. In 1967 someone set fire to its trunk cavity three times; the wound was sealed the following year and the tree kept growing. State protection followed in 1977, and in 1981 the dendrologist Guntis Eniņš intervened to move a sewage plant that was being built hard against its roots. Vides Vēstis measured it at 6.80 metres round in 2009; Eniņš's own book gives 6.85, a five-centimetre gap that is either a year of growth or the honest margin of a tape measure on a trunk this shape. Its age, about 330 years, comes from that same 2008 survey and has never been tightened since. Two other Riga trees run it close. The Ēbeļmuiža Oak in Pārdaugava is put at roughly 300 years, and the Lucavsala Linden at about 200, both from the same 2008 survey. All three are honest estimates rather than ring counts, kept loose rather than sharpened to look more certain than the evidence allows.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.