The Apple Tree of Zabudišová

In 2017 a nearly forgotten apple variety beat every other tree in Slovakia to become that year's national Tree of the Year, then went on to place sixth in the European final the following spring. Nobody had paid the tree much attention before the contest. It grows on a roadside in Zabudišová, a scattered hamlet of the village of Bošáca, and belongs to Citrónové zimné Zabudišovské, a lemon-yellow winter apple bred locally and grown almost nowhere else. Itinerant fruit-growers, tradesmen who planted orchards for a living and moved on, are thought to have put it in the ground roughly 130 years ago. When it won, it measured two and a half metres round and stood thirteen metres tall, dimensions that make sense for an apple tree left alone for well over a century. It still fruits. The variety's practical value, a fruit that keeps through winter without a cellar, is presumably why somebody planted it here in the first place, long before there was a competition to win. Three hundred and fifty metres away, on the same hillside, stands another Slovak Tree of the Year: a pink-fleshed pear that won two years earlier. Two national champions from one small stretch of Zabudišová, which almost nobody outside Bošáca seems to know.