The Old St Lucie Cherry of the Fuveszkert

The St Lucie cherry is usually a shrub. Six metres is a good one. This tree is 11.2 metres tall, with a trunk 339 centimetres around and a crown twelve metres wide, which is extraordinary for a species that normally grows out of a dry limestone slope at the edge of a wood. Hungarians call it sajmeggy. Nobody expects one to reach the size of an oak. It also got here first. ELTE's Fuveszkert is Hungary's oldest botanical garden, founded in 1771, but it only reached this ground in 1847, when the university bought the ten hectare Festetics castle garden with the backing of Palatine Archduke Joseph. Before the Festetics family took the property in 1798 it belonged to Marton Szeleczky, an imperial loyalist, and the cherry was already standing on his private estate. The garden was laid out around it rather than planted with it. At roughly 250 years old it has watched a nobleman's grounds turn into a scientific collection and then into a place anyone can buy a ticket to, without ever moving. It stands alone beside the main path, about eighty metres in from the Illes utca gate, on level ground you can reach with a pushchair or a wheelchair. Our pin is the garden rather than the tree, so look for the solitary one with the wide low crown.