The Russalka Oak

Estonia moved a road rather than cut this oak down. When the Reidi tee coastal scheme was drawn up, the new carriageway ran straight through the tree; local objection got the alignment bent around it instead, and when the road opened in 2019 the oak was still there. Estonians call it the Reidi tee tamm, after the thing it survived. That fight is what put it forward. In 2017 it stood as Estonia's entry to the European Tree of the Year and finished eleventh, a respectable placing for a tree this young. The reports put this one at somewhere between sixty and a hundred years, and nobody has published a girth for it, so the age stays a band rather than a number. It grows on the seafront green beside the Russalka, the bronze angel raised in 1902 for the crew lost when the warship of that name went down crossing to Helsinki. The memorial is older than the tree. Tallinn walks, runs and cycles past both on the Pirita promenade, which puts the oak, the monument and the swerve in the road within a few metres of each other. Two things are still open here: how old it is, and how thick. If you go past with a tape measure, we would like the number.