Ancient trees in Croatia

Trsteno's arboretum on the coast near Dubrovnik still grows two Oriental planes a sea captain is said to have carried home from Constantinople five centuries ago, trunks over five metres round, alongside a run of 19th-century plantings, a ginkgo, a cedar of Lebanon, a yew, each with a planting date recorded to the year rather than estimated from growth rings. Inland, a single lime at Gornja Stubica marks a different history: tradition holds that Matija Gubec gathered his followers under its canopy in January 1573 before leading the Croatian-Slovene Peasant Revolt, an uprising that ended in his execution and has stayed central to Croatian memory since. Split's old town keeps its own smaller cluster, a mulberry, a cypress and a walnut, all a little over a century old.