Cis Henrykowski (the Henryków Yew)

Poland's oldest living thing grows against the gable end of a farm outbuilding. The Henryków Yew stands on a working farmstead in Henryków Lubański behind an electrified fence, with a car park and information boards signposted three kilometres off road 296, because enough people come to see it. Nobody agrees on how old it is. Dr Cezary Pacyniak put it at 1,253 years in 1992 and revised that to roughly 1,270 in 2020; popular accounts round up to 1,300 and sometimes 1,500. Take the broad figure, comfortably over a thousand years, which starts this tree several centuries before there was a Poland. The twentieth century nearly finished it. Shellfire in 1945 tore into the trunk, and a hurricane in 1989 split and reduced the crown of a tree that had measured about five metres round. What is left is disputed even now: the natural monument register and a recent survey both give roughly 150 centimetres at breast height, while another source records 425. Both cannot be right, and nobody has settled which is. Between 2016 and 2020 conservators protected the roots, watered it through dry summers and propped what remained on scaffolding. It answered with fresh needles. Protected as a natural monument since April 1992, it now stands thirteen to fifteen metres tall, smaller in person than its reputation and still the oldest thing alive in the country.