Imagine planting hundreds of thousands of trees for a future fleet, only to discover decades later that the navy no longer needs the wood.
That is essentially what happened on Visingsö, a small Swedish island in Lake Vättern. In the 19th century, the Swedish Navy began growing a huge supply of oak trees there, expecting the timber would eventually be needed to build warships. By the time the trees were mature, however, naval technology had moved on, and wooden warships had given way to steel.
