Professor Chudoba's Plane

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.