Sjukhuseken

This oak is hollow from the ground to the top of the trunk, and you can walk inside it. The inside is scarred by an old fire, and birds nest in it. Sjukhuseken, the hospital oak, is about 800 years old by the county administration's own report on the natural monuments of Stockholm County, and 7.86 metres round, among the thickest of the protected oaks in the county. Its other name is the older one. Mörbyeken, after Mörby Crown Park, the ground it grew up in long before anyone put a hospital here. The hospital came to the tree rather than the other way round: it was first protected in 1948, and formally declared a natural monument on 30 June 1960, when Stockholm County Council took the land to build Danderyd Hospital around it. It is not a pristine specimen. In 1989 a large limb came down onto the playground beside it and the tree was heavily pruned in response. What stands on the slope above Edsviken today is a hollow, fire-marked, cut-back veteran keeping its place among hospital buildings, which is roughly what eight centuries look like from the outside. The metro station is named after the hospital and sits essentially at the site, fifteen to twenty minutes from the middle of Stockholm.