The Turkish Hazel of Cișmigiu

Romania has only two officially protected specimens of Corylus colurna, the Turkish hazel, and one of them grows inside Cișmigiu, Bucharest's oldest and most visited public park. Most of the species' native range lies far to the southeast, in the Balkans, Anatolia and the Caucasus, which makes a mature, healthy specimen this far north and west of its usual territory a genuine rarity rather than an ordinary park planting. Cișmigiu itself began as a swamp: the site was drained in 1830 on the order of General Pavel Kiseleff, then redesigned from 1847 by the Viennese-trained landscape architect Wilhelm Meyer, who filled the new grounds with imported and unusual species before the garden's official opening in 1854. No record fixes an exact planting date for this particular hazel, but its inclusion among Meyer's original plantings would put it among the oldest trees the park has, and its formal protection recognizes the tree for a fact simpler than age: outside a handful of botanical collections, there is nowhere else in the country to see one like it.