The Cornelian Cherry of Zlatá Koruna

A cornelian cherry usually spends its life as a shrub. This one got to be a tree, and the monastery's own note on it says only that it still remembers the Cistercians, which is the Czech way of saying it was already growing here before the abbey was dissolved in 1785. No planting date has ever been written down, so the age stays loose on purpose: over two hundred years, and possibly a good deal more than that. Its size is the figure to take carefully. The register puts the girth at 130 centimetres, unusually thick for Cornus mas and not confirmed by any second source. A species that tends to grow in clumps is easy to measure across several stems at once, and that may be what happened here. What it does every year is not in doubt. In late summer the branches load with drínky, scarlet fruit the shape and size of a small olive, sour raw and very good cooked. Czech kitchens still turn them into jam and syrup, and before that the fruit was a folk remedy, which is a reasonable thing to find growing in a monastery garden. It flowers in the other direction too, bare yellow in the last weeks of winter, months before anything around it wakes up. The tree stands in the garden on the tour route, so reaching it means the monastery ticket and its opening hours.