Vilnius protects this pine by name and has written down almost nothing else about it.
Scots Pine
Pinus sylvestris
Scots pine is the plainest tree here and one of the toughest: the only pine native to nearly all of Europe, from Spain to Siberia, growing wherever the soil is too thin or sandy for anything grander. We map 13 of them, in 11 cities.
Estonia's largest tree by volume is one, the King's Pine in the Järvselja training forest, more than 33 metres tall and put at about 380 years. Poland's oldest, Wszebora, has stood roughly 370 years above the Srebrna river and was named by schoolchildren in 2016. Helsinki's grows on a rocky shore beside a Bronze Age burial cairn built around 2000 BC, itself around 340 years old and barely 10 metres tall, stunted by three centuries in bare granite. Strasbourg's did the opposite, twisting up into a crown flattened into a parasol. In 2004 Slovakia's very first Tree of the Year was a wild Scots pine above Veľké Borové.
Vilnius
Helsinki
Helsinki's oldest confirmed tree grows next to a grave older than the city itself, a Bronze Age burial cairn built around 2000 BC on a rocky shore in Meilahti.
An anthill lives in this pine.
Dresden
This pine has watched the forest around it be felled and grown back twice.
Gliniak
The oldest Scots pine in Poland was named by schoolchildren.
Photo: Panek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Järvselja
Estonia's largest tree by volume is not an oak or a lime.
Rouen
In a forest of beech and oak, one conifer marks the junction.
Stokaičiai
Almost every protected veteran in this corner of Lithuania is an oak.
Strasbourg
Strasbourg's register singles this pine out for three things, and one of them is the ivy on its trunk.
Sulechów
This pine is fatter at chest height than it is at the ground, which is not how trees are meant to work.
Photo: Paweł Borkowski (user:99kerob) (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Poland's thickest Scots pine took the title from a tree ten kilometres up the road, and it never had to grow to do it.
Veľké Borové
When Slovakia crowned its very first Tree of the Year in 2004, the winner was a Scots pine growing wild on a forested hillside above the small village of Veľké Borové, at the foot of Súšava hill.
Photo: Teslaton (CC BY 3.0)
Vír
The village this pine is named after lies under the reservoir it now looks down on.
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