The Seven Chieftains Plane

This tree is not the one its name first belonged to. Palatine Joseph's original favourite plane on Margaret Island, split into seven trunks after an 1838 flood snapped it as a sapling, was struck by lightning and finally died around 1935; Hungarians called it the Het Testver, the Seven Brothers. A different plane growing 265 metres north, opposite what is now the Palatinus Strand, took catastrophic damage of its own during the fighting that swept the island in January 1945. Rather than remove it, head gardener Antal Kunsch cut the wrecked trunk back hard, and the tree responded by resprouting into seven new limbs of its own, an accident of pruning that echoed the older tree closely enough that Budapest's parks authority renamed it in tribute: the Hetvezer, the Seven Chieftains. Eight decades later it casts roughly 300 square metres of shade, nearly 30 metres tall, its bark peeling in the mottled patches typical of old planes, on ground that thousands of sunbathers walk past every summer on their way to the baths without necessarily knowing they are looking at a war wound that became one of the island's best-loved trees.