The Oak of Wzgorze Luizy

At the foot of a hill named for a dead queen's role in defeating Napoleon grows Lostowice's oldest documented tree. Wzgorze Luizy, a 68 metre moraine hill, was named in 1810 for Louise of Prussia, credited with brokering the Prussian-Russian alliance that helped bring Napoleon down five years later; in 1813 Prussian Landwehr troops clashed with Napoleonic forces on this exact hill, and in 1817 an iron cross went up on the summit naming nine officers who died in it. This pedunculate oak, protected as a natural monument since the late 1980s and estimated at around 250 years old, was already mature when that battle happened, growing quietly at the base of the slope while history took place above it. It has outlasted the monument's own turbulent afterlife: the hill was informally renamed for a local landowner after the Second World War, and only recently got an official viewpoint restoring some of its original prominence. Two younger trees, an oak and a beech, grow near the summit closer to the iron cross itself, added to the protected list decades after this one. Of the three, this is the tree that was already old when the story the hill is named for happened.