The Great Plane of Topčider

Seventeen iron posts have held up the crown of Belgrade's largest tree since 1881, propping branches that would otherwise have snapped under their own 49 metre spread a century and a half ago. The plane tree stands in front of Milošev Konak in Topčider, the hunting lodge Prince Miloš Obrenović built as Serbia was clawing its way toward autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, and a popular story credits the prince himself with planting it from a single weak seedling in an old lime kiln. The dates do not cooperate: Miloš left Topčider for exile in 1839, and the tree itself, dated to 1834 by the same municipal records that later declared it a natural monument, was most likely planted after he had already gone. What survives the legend is the tree itself, a trunk 7.35 metres around, a height of 34 metres, and a canopy that shades nearly 1,900 square metres of the park, nearly two centuries into a life that has outlasted a princedom, a kingdom, and two versions of Yugoslavia. Declared a natural monument in 1979, it remains, by most measures, the biggest single tree in the Serbian capital.