In 2018 a municipal crew digging a trench for park lighting cut through two of the main support roots of Cișmigiu's oldest tree, and within two years a full quarter of its crown had dried out and died. The plane tree is reckoned at around 200 years old by one account and closer to 170 by another that ties its planting more directly to the park's own founding, when Viennese-trained landscape architect Wilhelm Meyer turned a drained swamp into Bucharest's first public garden between 1847 and its 1854 opening. Either figure makes it one of the very few survivors of that original planting scheme still standing. Popular legend has occasionally stretched its age to 300 or even 500 years, a claim the park's own history rules out immediately: nothing could have been growing here before the marsh itself was drained in 1830. What is true is dramatic enough without embellishment. The tree has outlived a kingdom, two world wars, and decades of the regime that followed, only to lose a quarter of its living crown to a lighting cable trench nobody has since gone back to properly repair. It is still standing, still shading part of the park it has occupied for close to two centuries, its damage visible to anyone who looks up rather than hidden away.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Cișmigiu Gardens, Bulevardul Regina Elisabeta, Sector 5, Bucharest
You can recognise it by the dead quarter of its crown, dried out after a lighting trench cut two of its main roots in 2018. It is the oldest tree in Cismigiu.
Central Bucharest, main entrance on Bulevardul Regina Elisabeta; a 5 minute walk from Izvor or Universitate metro stations
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.