Prince Eugen's Oak

Sweden once made cutting down an oak a capital offense, because the navy needed every mature oak trunk for warship hulls and the crown claimed ownership of the species outright, a protection that stayed in force in some form until the 1830s. This oak, growing today just north of the painter Prince Eugen's old home at Waldemarsudde, is one of the direct beneficiaries: at 300 to 400 years old, it predates that legal protection's repeal by a comfortable margin and is Stockholm's largest tree by volume, 45 cubic metres of wood by a 2006 measurement, with a trunk 9.2 metres around and a canopy 21 metres tall. It originally grew as three separate trunks fused near the base, the kind of multi-stemmed form old oaks take when a young tree loses its main leader and several side branches compete to replace it. Prince Eugen, the so-called Painter Prince, bought Waldemarsudde in 1899 and would have known this oak as an already-ancient fixture of the grounds decades before his own paintings made the estate famous; the tree outranks his tenure there by centuries in one direction and, since his death in 1947, has outlasted him by generations in the other. It remains the benchmark against which Djurgarden's roughly 3,000 other protected oaks are measured, the single largest specimen in a park that holds more ancient oaks than almost anywhere else in Northern Europe.