The Ash of the Royal Rifle Factory

This ash tree is older than the gun factory that grew up around it. The Prussian state's Royal Rifle Factory moved onto this stretch of Lakowa street in 1839, converted from an earlier sugar refinery, and expanded through the 19th century into a complex that at its 1918 wartime peak turned out 2,500 rifles a day with 6,500 workers on the payroll, before closing for good in 1921 when the newly independent Free City of Danzig demilitarised. The ash predates all of it, estimated at around 280 years old, which puts its own roots down sometime in the early 18th century, decades before anyone here was making weapons. It stands 26 metres tall with a trunk 523 centimetres around, in what is now a quiet courtyard inside the old factory walls. Its protected status is recent and came from an unusual source: since April 2017, Gdansk has run a programme letting any resident nominate a tree for legal protection, and this ash, tucked away where most passersby would never look for it, was one of the results. A factory that armed a kingdom rose and fell around it in under a century. The tree just kept growing.