The Pagoda Tree of Buda Castle

By the time Franz Joseph became emperor, this tree had already outlived the reason anyone remembered planting it. Antal Tost, gardener to Palatine Joseph, chose a Japanese pagoda tree for the slope beside Buda Castle's great southern rondella around 1790, when the species itself was still a botanical novelty in Europe, imported from China only a few decades earlier despite its misleading name. By 1862, an academic lecture was already calling it the largest tree in the castle garden. It survived the 1848-49 revolution, when fighting tore through the district around it, and came close to losing a very different fight decades later: when the castle's gardens were redesigned at the end of the 19th century, the plan called for the tree's removal, until head gardener Karoly Mraz personally persuaded Franz Joseph to spare it. It survived the Second World War too, through fighting that flattened much of the district above it. Today it stands roughly 230 to 250 years old by the estimates on record, Budapest's oldest documented tree, on ground that is free to walk through the South Gardens' terraces. Locals nicknamed it simply the Nagy Fa, the Big Tree, long before anyone thought to give it a more official name.