What is the oldest tree in Budapest?
Budapest's oldest documented tree is the Japanese Pagoda Tree beside the Great Rondella at Buda Castle, planted around 1790 and estimated at 230 to 250 years old. It survived the 1848-49 revolution, a plan to remove it in the 1890s, and heavy fighting in the Second World War.
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.
One of Budapest's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest, a themed collection spanning several cities.