What is the oldest tree in Budapest?

Antal Tost, gardener to Palatine Joseph, planted a Japanese pagoda tree on the slope beside Buda Castle's great southern rondella around 1790, when the species was still a rare Chinese import into Europe despite its misleading Japanese name. By 1862 an academic lecture already called it the largest tree in the castle garden. It stood through the cannon fire of the 1848-49 revolution, and nearly lost a slower fight decades later: when the castle gardens were redesigned at the end of the 19th century, the plan called for felling it, until head gardener Karoly Mraz personally talked Emperor Franz Joseph into sparing it instead. It survived the Second World War as well, through fighting that flattened much of the district around it, and today stands on ground that is free to walk through the South Gardens' terraces below the palace. Locals have long called it simply the Nagy Fa, the Big Tree, a name older and plainer than any of the official ones the city has since given it.