Valkasken

Carl Linnaeus wrote this ash down in the 1740s and it is still standing. It had already turned up in a record of the Langholmen spinhouse garden in 1733, which gives it a paper trail of nearly three centuries, something almost no other tree in Stockholm can show. The name is about its skin. Valkasken means the burl ash, for the lumps and swellings running up both of its trunks. Nobody has established what causes them. The likeliest explanation is a genetic mutation the tree has carried its whole life, which would put the thing it is famous for there before Linnaeus ever saw it. Stockholm has a few other burl ashes, in Humlegarden and in Ivar Los park, and none of them wears it like this one. It grows double-stemmed beside Skutskepparvagen on Langholmen's southern shore, next to the Heleneborg boat club's winter storage yard, on an island that was a prison and a spinning house long before it was a park. Rutger Sernander listed it as natural monument 288 in his 1935 survey and the county's 2016 review counts it among 42 ashes worth protecting, but a 2003 proposal to give it actual legal protection went nowhere when the city stopped designating monuments. It stands on its reputation and nothing else.