The Windecki Red Oak (Windecki punane tamm)

The house burned down in 1995. The oak the owner planted is still standing. Robert Weisse built Windecki as a summer estate on the terrace below the Lasnamäe cliff and laid out its park before his death in 1886. The timber main house went up in flames a century later and was never rebuilt. What survived is the planting: 32 trees where there were 42 in 1995, a row of seventeen old European larches, and this red oak. The dendrologist Olev Abner surveyed the ground in 2017 and made the case that it is probably the oldest red oak in Estonia, thicker in the trunk and taller than either of the two others the country protects individually. He recorded it at 24 metres high and 83 centimetres through. The age comes from the park rather than from a ring count: if the oak went in with Weisse's original planting, it is roughly 140 to 150 years old now, and that "if" is the whole basis for the number. There is a second wrinkle. A 2007 survey of the same park recorded its largest red oak at the same 24 metres but only 61 centimetres through, which is either a different tree or a different tape measure. Estonia gave this one formal protection in 2020. Maarjamäe is twenty minutes out from the centre, and the park is small enough to find it in.