Bohunovice is a village near Olomouc, and an oak standing on a field track just south of it is the last survivor of a planting made to hold the banks of a fishpond founded in 1577: two information boards beside the tree disagree on its age by more than a century, and nobody has settled which is right. The pond and its guard cottage are gone; the oak is what remains of them.
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Hromuv Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 300 to 450 years (disputed, see notes) · Bohunovice cadastral area, Olomouc District, Olomouc Region
Two information boards stand beside this oak and they disagree with each other. One says the tree is 300 years old, the other says 438. Nobody has settled it, and the Czech Wikipedia entry records the discrepancy rather than choosing, which is the honest position: somewhere between three hundred and four hundred and fifty years, with the boards themselves as the evidence of how loosely that is known.
What the oak is agreed to be is a survivor. It is described as the last of the oaks planted to hold the embankments of the Velky rybnik, the Great Fishpond founded in 1577, and it stands near where the Strazna bouda, the guard cottage, used to be. The cottage is gone and so is the rest of the planting. The tree is 630 centimetres round, up from 600 when it was measured in 2004, and 27 metres tall.
It has been protected since 2005 and had tree surgery in March 2011. In 2010 it won Czech Tree of the Year and went on to represent the country in the European competition.
Getting to it is deliberately unglamorous. A dusty field track runs between Hlusovice and Chomoutov, unmarked and unsignposted, walkable or better on a bike, and the oak is simply standing beside it in the fields. There is no gate and nothing to pay.
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