An island planted in oak trees in the 19th century towards boat building 150 years in the future– and left growing after the advent of steel hulls.
Sweden's largest contiguous oak forest grows on Visingsö, a long and narrow island in the southern half of Lake Vättern (created, it's said, by a giant throwing soil into the lakewater to make a stepping stone for his wife).
Many island forests still stand due to their relative isolation– difficulty of access can leave tracts of financially valuable timber intact. From the shore, the forests of Visingsö might appear as such; a tall, wild, forest– hundreds of years in place. But these oaks were planted.
Oak wood is highly valued for shipbuilding, but oaks are incredibly slow-growing trees. By the early 19th century, it was clear that the size and demand of the military maritime fleet was outpacing Sweden's forests, a pressure that only increased due to a series of wars and skirmishes from 1800-1830. Soon after the Napoleonic Wars, the Crown planted hundreds of hectacres of oaks– 300,000 trees in all– on the island of Visingsö, to be harvested in a staggeringly distant 1975.
In 1856, the Bessemer process for steel production was patented. By the 1880s, almost all new sailing vessels were being built with iron or steel hulls. By the 1910s, steamships had all but replaced sailing ships, even for transport of cargo. Diesel replaced steam. 1975 came and went. The oaks were left growing.
Originally planted interspersed with spruce, pine, and other conifers to force the young oak seedlings into a ruler-like verticality, the oaks of Visingsö (now 193 years old) rise like columns into a tall canopy– sentinels from a world that knew a different kind of power.
