Wszebora

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.