Huge fir confirmed as Stately Tree

Take note – story published 8 years ago

It was confirmed Thursday that the widest fir tree in the Baltic states grows inside Krimulda manor park near the town of Sigulda, reported the state Nature Conservation Agency (DAP).

At the behest of local tree-huggers Julita and Atis Klušs the DAP had sent experts from its Vidzeme regional department to check out the park territory for trees possibly deserving of the designation ‘dižkoks’ – meaning Giant Tree.

There they indeed verified and vouched that one particularly massive specimen – measuring 4.63 meters around the base of its trunk and stretching 45 meters towards the sky, was the widest of any other of its kind in the Baltic.

“It was rather tricky to make the measurement accurately, as there’s a little elm growing intertwined with it at measuring level,” Julita Kluša, one of the discoverers of the tree together with husband Atis, told LSM. The pair have done painstaking search-and-measure missions throughout the land before arriving at this fir tree in question and notifying the appropriate authorities about their hunch that this just might be the Big One.

The Krimulda manor park is part of the Gauja National Park (GNP) nature reserve, and the tree is found in a wooded stretch of the territory between the Krimulda church and castle mound. Experts believe the fir to be around 150 years old. The park is rich with grand old trees – firs and pine, the former being around the age of their fellow Giant Tree, the latter even as old as 250 or more year-old pines.

Soon the area around it will be cleared to make way for the deserved signs and postings explaining the super-status of the natural monument fir tree, which is now registered in the natural monument database system Ozols.

The DAP specialists also list the tree as being among Europe’s thirty biggest fir trees. Estonia’s largest measures 3.52 meters wide at the base of its trunk, Lithuania’s slightly wider at 3.89 around its base.

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