Seasons1 of 4
The Great Fire of Turku in 1827 took most of the city and it took the botanical garden this oak was planted in. The oak is still standing. It grew from a seed around 1750 and went into the ground on the Piispantalo property in the 1760s, part of the garden Pehr Kalm laid out and directed from 1757. Kalm was the Turku Academy's first professor of economics and a student of Linnaeus, and this tree is effectively the last of his garden. The city's own tree inventory calls it the oldest tree in Turku. Its surveyors measured it on 10 July 2020 and recorded 4.97 metres round and 17 metres tall, on the bank of the Aura between the river and the Sibelius Museum. In 2012 an environmental artwork called Pehr Kalm Revival was installed near it, tracing the plan of the garden that no longer exists. Approach from the riverside promenade, a short walk from the Market Square. The tree is clearly visible from the public path and that costs nothing. How close you can actually get depends on where the museum's own garden begins, and that boundary is one we have not established. If you walk it and find out, tell us.
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Getting there
Sibelius Museum grounds, Piispankatu 17, Turku, on the bank of the Aura river
You can recognise it as the old oak on the riverbank, clearly visible from the public path between the Aura and the Sibelius Museum. It stands on the grounds of Pehr Kalm's former botanical garden.
Free. Visible from the public Aura riverside path; the Sibelius Museum's own garden is ticketed and the exact boundary between the two is not signposted.
Central Turku, short walk from the Market Square along the Aura riverside promenade
In fruit
October to November: acorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in them
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.