Dab Grot (the Grot Oak)

In 2011, Poland picked its first favourite tree, and an oak outside a small garrison town beat out eighty-four rivals from every corner of the country. Grot, as it is known, took the inaugural Drzewo Roku contest organised by Klub Gaja, edging Katowice's beech Anton in a final round that drew nearly 3,500 votes, out of more than 15,000 cast across the whole contest. Students at the town's Gimnazjum nr 2 had put its name forward. The tree itself is enormous even before the story starts: a trunk 6 metres round, a crown spreading 16 metres, a height of 28. Nobody has dated it precisely, but the local account puts it at least 500 years old, which would make it older than the fortress Tsar Nicholas I ordered built at Deblin, a project that felled many of the district's other old oaks and left this one standing. Local tradition has attached a wish to it: press your left hand to the bark and whisper what you want, and it is said to come true. Whether or not that works, the oak has outlasted an empire's garrison and a forest's worth of neighbours to do it, and it stands in the open near ul. Podchorazych with nothing between you and the trunk.