Ancient trees in the Czech Republic

The city's register says as much rather than repeating it, which sets the tone for the rest. Prague dates its trees in ranges and admits where two records disagree by eighty years, as they do for the ginkgo in Stromovka. Brno keeps its own list: the Bystrc Lime, past 400 years old, survived a 1933 fire when a neighbour tried to smoke a marten out of its hollow trunk by setting it alight. Cesky Krumlov's oldest tree turns the usual pattern round: it is the free one, a village-square lime older than the paid monastery lindens nearby. Beyond the three cities, twenty single-tree villages carry the country's national Tree of the Year winners and its stranger stories: Teleci's hollow lime a person can stand inside, Rimov's pilgrimage linden that once held 51 people inside its trunk at once, an oak near Lukavice its own estate once tried to kill by stripping the soil from its roots, a beech at a mountain border crossing that is not the famous tree it replaced, a pine on a reservoir island near Vir that Europe voted its 2020 tree of the year, an oak in Viska that held back a flash flood in 2010, and the pear tree near Mrakotin that a folk song is named for. Twenty-four places, 66 trees mapped so far.