The Oak of Biały Kamień

Poland's register of natural monuments protects this oak without saying where it is. The entry carries a species, a designation date of 2 July 2013 and a set of measurements, and for a location a cadastral parcel number. Warsaw's own fuller list gets closer without getting precise: in the vicinity of ul. Bialy Kamien, western Mokotow. Expect to do a little looking when you arrive. What the register does give is a trunk 306 centimetres round and a crown 20.5 metres up. Nobody has dated the tree, so that trunk is the only clock available. A circumference of 306 centimetres is a diameter near 97, and open-grown pedunculate oaks of that thickness generally run somewhere between 100 and 200 years old. The band is wide and it stays wide, because sharpening it would be invention. Even at the young end of it, this oak was already growing when the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944 and Mokotow became one of the districts that held out longest. Almost nothing built around here came through that autumn intact. The oak did, and in 2013 the city wrote it into the same register that protects the great trees of Lazienki and the university botanical garden, on the strength of one thick trunk on an ordinary suburban street. If you know when it was planted, tell us.