The Sophora of Vajanského Embankment

Slovakia's state register of protected trees keeps its reasoning short, and this one earned five separate lines: cultural, scientific, landscape, historical and aesthetic value, all cited when the tree was formally protected in 1996. A Japanese pagoda tree this size is an odd sight on a Danube embankment, a species more at home in East Asia than Central Europe, with a crown eighteen metres up and a trunk just over three metres round. The register put its age at eighty years back in 1996, which sets its planting near 1916, the last full year of the Austro-Hungarian empire this city once belonged to. It stands in a small public park along the riverside promenade, a few minutes' walk from Hviezdoslav Square, easy to miss among the plane trees that line the embankment proper unless you already know a pagoda tree is there to find. Nobody has re-measured it since the original designation, so its exact current girth is this project's own estimate rather than a fresh reading, and a reader with a tape measure would settle the question in a minute.