The Tree of Science

Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary, planted this plane tree with his own hands in 1823 on what was then his private island retreat, two years before Count Istvan Szechenyi founded the Hungarian Academy of Sciences a short walk away across the water. The near-coincidence in dates gave the tree its modern title: the city and the Academy jointly named it the Tree of Science, a formal honour for a plane that has quietly outlasted both the Habsburg court that planted it and the war that nearly took its neighbours. Its statistics explain the reputation on their own: a trunk 6.64 metres around, a crown 55 metres wide, and a canopy foresters have estimated at 30 to 50 tonnes of leaf and wood, among the most admired plane crowns anywhere in Europe. It has stood through two world wars, the 1956 revolution, and repeated redesigns of the island around it, rooted between the ruined Dominican convent where Saint Margaret of Hungary once lived and the Art Nouveau water tower built in 1911. Archduke Joseph is the reason Margaret Island has any ancient trees at all: he turned a semi-wild royal hunting ground into a private garden in the 1810s and 1820s, planting exotic specimens with no way of knowing they would still be standing two centuries later, at nearly double the height of the buildings around them.