Prince Eugen's Oak

Sweden once made cutting down an oak a capital offense, because the navy needed every mature trunk for warship hulls and the crown claimed the species outright, a protection that stayed in force in some form until the 1830s. This oak, 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 the repeal comfortably, and it is the largest tree in the city of Stockholm, 45 cubic metres by a 2006 measurement, with a trunk 9.2 metres around and a canopy 21 metres tall. Read that volume as the size of the shape rather than a quantity of wood. The trunk is completely hollow, which is what an oak of this age is supposed to be: heartwood is dead weight and a veteran lets it go, living on in a cylinder a few centimetres thick. Stockholm county holds bigger oaks. The city does not. It grew as three trunks fused near the base, the form old oaks take when a young tree loses its leader and several side branches compete to replace it. Prince Eugen bought Waldemarsudde in 1899 and knew this oak as an already-ancient fixture decades before his paintings made the estate famous. It outranks his tenure by centuries in one direction and, since his death in 1947, has outlasted him in the other. Djurgarden's roughly 3,000 other protected oaks are still measured against it.