The Währinger Park Oak

Vienna protected this oak in July 1956, which makes it one of the older entries on a register that most of the city's trees joined decades later. It is Natural Monument 458, standing at the Peezgasse side of the Währinger Park, right on the line where the 18th district meets the 19th. The two official descriptions of it do not quite agree, and that is worth knowing before you go. The monument list calls it a plain pedunculate oak, 2.9 metres round, 16 metres tall, with a crown 12 metres across. The city's tree cadastre, which records a tree two metres from the same point, calls it a columnar oak, the upright cultivar of the same species, and measures the trunk at 4.1 metres. It may be one tree measured at different times or in different ways, or two labels for the same trunk. We have not settled it. Standing in front of it, you may be able to: a columnar oak grows narrow and upright, a plain one spreads. There is a second protected oak in this park, about 110 metres away, planted in 1923 when the park opened. This is not that one. Nobody has published a reliable age for number 458, so we give none. If you know it, or can tell us which shape the crown has, tell us.