The Plane Trees of Trsteno

Around 500 years ago, a sea captain remembered as Florio Jakob Antunov sailed home to Trsteno from Constantinople with five young plane tree saplings and planted them beside a spring on the village's main square. Three did not survive; two did, and they have spent the five centuries since growing into what botanists call unique specimens of their kind anywhere in continental Europe, trunks five metres across and canopies rising as high as 50 to 60 metres over the village road. They have outlasted the Republic of Dubrovnik that existed when they were planted, survived the 1991 war that reached this coastline, came through a 2000 forest fire that swept the surrounding hills, and, in February 2020, caught fire themselves when nearby weed-burning sent a spark into a rotten branch; firefighters put it out with foam before serious damage was done. Croatia nominated the pair for European Tree of the Year in 2018, official recognition for two trees that have needed no institutional protection to survive this long, only the water from the spring they were planted beside and, evidently, considerable luck. They stand on public ground, not inside the paid arboretum next door, free for anyone driving the coast road through Trsteno to stop and stand beneath.