Brno pulled down its city walls between 1809 and 1859 and planted a ring of parks where they had stood. Seven protected trees grow in and around that ring: two oaks at opposite ends of one square, a horse chestnut opposite the opera house, a plane on the ramparts below the cathedral, another on hospital ground, one renamed for a professor who once praised it in print, and the thickest on a corner where a bus station used to be.
0 of 7 visited in Brno
1
The Moravian Square Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 150 years · Brno-střed (city centre)
Brno put a price on this oak before it protected it: more than 600,000 Kčs, the figure on record when the city's national committee declared it a memorial tree on 27 June 1985, alongside two other trees in the same park. The reason given was plain enough. It was the strongest tree there, and a solitary specimen worth keeping. The park is a piece of demolition. Brno pulled down its city walls between 1809 and 1859 and laid a ring of green where the fortifications had run, and Moravské náměstí is one link in that ring. At roughly 150 years, the oak is about as old as the planting around it. Today it stands just under 30 metres, with a trunk of 435 to 440 centimetres depending on which year you take the tape from: the city's figure and the national register's differ by five centimetres and a few seasons of growth, not by any real disagreement. Around 2005 arborists took out its dead wood, and it has been reported in good health since. Czech signs call it Dub letní na Moravském náměstí. Turistika.cz calls it the most beautiful memorial oak in Brno, which is a strong claim in a park that holds a second protected oak 130 metres down the grass.
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2
The Old Town Gate Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · over 170 years · Brno-střed (city centre)
The law draws a circle round this oak. It runs 13.4 metres from the trunk in every direction, and inside it nothing may be done that would harm the tree, which is a generous amount of ground to fence off with a regulation in the middle of a city. The oak stands at the southern tip of the Moravské náměstí park, close to where the Tišnovská brána, the Tišnov Gate, once let travellers through Brno's walls. The gate is gone. So are the walls, taken down between 1809 and 1859 and replaced by the ring of parks the tree now grows in. Its measurements come from different decades and it shows. Brno's heritage encyclopedia recorded 410 centimetres round in 2004 and 423 in 2010; the national register carries 480, from a record last touched in 2018. Height is about 25 metres, and the age is given as more than 170 years, which is as precise as anyone has been willing to be. One honest note. The freshest photograph we could find of this particular oak, rather than of its better known neighbour 130 metres north, was taken in May 2015, and the register still lists it as standing. If you get there before we do, tell us what you found.
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3
The Horse Chestnut of Rooseveltova
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · roughly 160 years · Brno-střed (city centre)
A car park nearly wrote the end of this chestnut's story. When plans came up for an underground garage beneath the little park on Rooseveltova, the architecture press covered them as a question about one tree: whether digging that close to a protected trunk would take its roots with it. The tree is a horse chestnut of about 160 years, protected since 2007, standing in the middle of the park opposite the Janáček Theatre and a short walk from the old Governor's Palace. It survives from the first redesign of this ground after Brno's fortifications came down, when a strip that had carried walls became gardens instead. Its trunk measures between 320 and 326 centimetres at chest height, two numbers from different surveys rather than two different trees, and it stands about 25 metres tall. In 2019 the park around it was renamed Park Danuše Muzikářové. The tree kept its own name, Jírovec maďal na Rooseveltově, and its own quiet job in the city's year: in May it is the flowering tree in a square full of theatre-goers, and by late September the ground beneath it is a conker supply for anyone who wants one.
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Photo: Michal Klajban (CC BY-SA 3.0)
4
The Plane Tree Below Petrov
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 160 years · Brno-střed (city centre, below Petrov hill)
One of Brno's protected trees keeps seasonal hours. The plane below Petrov grows on a small terrace built into the old city ramparts at the end of Denisovy sady, and that terrace is planted up with flower displays through the tourist season and closed off in winter. Come in January and you look at the tree from the path instead of standing under it, which is worth knowing before you walk up the hill. The plane is about 160 years old, its crown reaching some 25 metres, and its trunk measures 400 to 415 centimetres depending on whose tape and which year: the national register carries the lower figure, turistika.cz the higher one. Above it stands the Cathedral of St Peter and Paul, the silhouette in every photograph of the city. Denisovy sady itself was laid out along the ramparts, which makes this corner one of the few places in Brno where the defensive works survive as landscape rather than as a line on a map. The Czech name is Platan javorolistý na Petrově. Locals will tell you this is the best corner of the park, and standing on the terrace with the rooftops in front of you and the cathedral at your back, it is hard to argue.
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5
The Plane Tree of St Anne's
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · over 150 years · Staré Brno
The biggest tree on this walk is not in a park. It grows on the grounds of St Anne's University Hospital between pavilions V and C1, and the easiest way in is the gate on the south side off Hybešova. Nobody asks your business at a public teaching hospital, but this is a working campus rather than a public garden, so take it quietly. The plane repays the detour. Its trunk measures 565 to 575 centimetres round, the two figures a few years apart rather than two different trees, and it divides into several secondary stems about four metres up. Before the crown was cut back it spread close to 40 metres, measured in 2004. The hospital behind it went up between 1865 and 1868, a Neo-Renaissance design by the Viennese architect Theophil Hansen. Local sources suspect the tree was planted with the building, which would put it over 150 years old, but nobody has demonstrated that and the register carries no age at all, so treat the link as likely rather than settled. What is certain is that this crown has been the view from a great many hospital windows, in a city that has been sending its sick to this address for more than a century and a half.
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6
The Plane Tree of Benešova
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Brno-střed (city centre, near the main train station)
This plane outlasted a bus station. The corner of Benešova and Divadelní held Brno's central bus terminal, a modernist building of 1948 and 1949 by Bohuslav Fuchs, a name attached to much of the city's functionalist architecture. The buses left. The tree stayed, and it is now the protected thing on a corner where everything else has changed its use at least once. It is the plainest entry on this walk, not a park specimen but a street tree at a junction five minutes from the main station, which is exactly what makes it easy to find. Its trunk measures 368 centimetres in the national register; the Czech Wikipedia list of the district's memorial trees gives 310 at the same coordinates, an older measurement rather than a different tree. Nobody has published an age for it, anywhere, and that gap stays a gap here rather than becoming a plausible number. Brno's own street records list the tree as Benešova 0/01, a plot rather than a building, which is what Czech addressing does with something that has been given standing of its own. Walk past it on the way in from the train and you have started this walk before you meant to.
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7
Professor Chudoba's Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 100 to 120 years · Brno-Veveří
A professor put this tree on the record by complaining about everything around it. František Chudoba, Masaryk University's first professor of English philology, walked past this corner every day on his way to teach, and in a 1930 newspaper column he tore into Brno's neglected public greenery, then singled out this one plane tree as proof that something could still thrive here despite the city's indifference. The plane took the compliment. It was declared a protected tree in 2003 and, in 2021, the city renamed it for him: Platan profesora Chudoby.
The measurements disagree with each other more than most. Brno's own botanical record puts the girth at 383 centimetres in 2013; the national memorial-tree register gives 475 centimetres for the same trunk. Ninety centimetres is too much to explain by growth alone in that span, so one of the two figures is likely an error rather than a fresh measurement, and this page states both rather than picking a winner. Age is put at roughly 100 to 120 years by different sources, old enough that Chudoba himself would have known it as already substantial when he wrote about it, not as a sapling.
It stands on the corner of Veveří and Pekárenská, wedged into a tight urban plot, growing anyway.
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