How do I find it? You can recognise it as what looks like two pines from a distance but shares one base, dividing low into a taller stem and a shorter one. It stands 200m along a signed forest trail from the parking area near Gliniak.
The oldest Scots pine in Poland was named by schoolchildren. A 2016 competition settled on Wszebora, an old Slavic name, for a tree that had stood roughly 370 years on a scarp above the Srebrna river without one. From a distance it reads as two trees. At the ground it is one: a single base that divides low, sending up a taller stem of about 22 metres and a shorter one of about 17. Published girths run between 375 and 412 centimetres, and the sources do not agree closely enough to settle on a single figure. It grows in the Stankowizna forest district of Nadleśnictwo Mińsk, about 35 kilometres east of Warsaw, in forest that is still worked for timber. Protection came in 1972 and was reconfirmed by a Mazovian voivode regulation in 2009. In 2012 the foresters laid a short trail out to it, 200 metres from a parking area, and signed the whole thing Najstarsza sosna w Polsce, Poland's oldest pine. Wind and snow have thinned the crown over the years and branches have been taken off, so what you walk up to is a veteran rather than a postcard pine. That is what close to four centuries of Mazovian weather leaves behind. It is alive, it is still putting on needles, and it is still the oldest of its kind in the country.
- Species
- Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris)
- Girth
- 3.9 m
- Location
- Leśnictwo Stankowizna, Nadleśnictwo Mińsk, section 144a, near Gliniak village (Gliniak, near Mińsk Mazowiecki)
- Access
- Free, publicly accessible. Stands in state forest (Nadleśnictwo Mińsk) on a scarp above the Srebrna river; a nature-educational trail called 'Najstarsza sosna w Polsce' (Poland's oldest pine), built in 2012, leads 200 metres from a forest parking area to the tree.
- Getting there
- Rural forest location near Mińsk Mazowiecki, about 35 km east of Warsaw. No public transport to the trailhead; reached by car via the forest parking area.
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Sources
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