Sulechów, a small town in Lubusz, holds two argued-over pines in the same state forest. Sosna Waligóra, a kilometre and a half out on a marked trail, is fatter at chest height than at the ground, evidence it started life as two trees fused into one. Ten kilometres further stands Sosna Rzepicha, thicker still and the country's current record holder. A third tree, an oak six kilometres out, carries a name that sounds like an age and is not one.
0 / 3 visitati a Sulechów
Foto: Paweł Borkowski (user:99kerob) (CC BY-SA 3.0)
1
Sosna Waligóra
Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) · roughly 160-170 years · near Sulechów, Lubusz Voivodeship
This pine is fatter at chest height than it is at the ground, which is not how trees are meant to work. At 1.3 metres it measures 620 centimetres round. At the base it measures 527. The likeliest explanation is that Waligóra was never one tree: at least two grew together low down, fused into a single mass, and the whole thing divides at about two metres into eight bent limbs.
That accident of biography makes it the second thickest pine in Poland. The thickest, Rzepicha, happens to stand in the same forest district. In a national competition in 2002, Waligóra was judged the thickest specimen anyone put forward.
The age is the surprise in the other direction. It is only about 160 to 170 years old, young for a tree with a reputation, and its bulk comes from its shape rather than from time. The eight limbs are now held with steel cables and there is a low wooden fence around the base.
It is easy to reach and hard to miss: 80 metres off national road 32, a kilometre and a half east of Sulechów, with a parking area at the roadside. An 18-stop educational trail called Do Waligóra has run 3.4 kilometres out to it since 1998, and the local green and black hiking routes pass the same way. Protected since December 1982, reconfirmed by the voivode in 2006, and stranger up close than any photograph makes it look.
Leggi di più e come arrivare →
2
Sosna Rzepicha
Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) · near Górki Małe, Sulechów municipality
Poland's thickest Scots pine took the title from a tree ten kilometres up the road, and it never had to grow to do it. The measuring rules changed. Sosna Waligóra held the record under the older method; Rzepicha holds it under the current one, at 5.68 metres round. The figure makes more sense once you see the trunk, which is five stems fused into a single mass, carrying one wide, well-built crown 27 metres up. There are dead branches in it with scars where the wounds closed over, and it is otherwise rated in very good health. It has been a protected nature monument since 1996, in the Nowy Świat forestry district between Pomorsko and Górki Małe, about ten and a half kilometres from Sulechów. Reaching it is the hard part, and it is worth being plain about that. Waligóra has a marked trail and somewhere to leave the car. Rzepicha has neither. It stands at the edge of a thicket on the Oder floodplain, beside a pool, with marshy meadow in front of it, and the last stretch from Górki Małe or Pomorsko is off the path and through wet ground. Wear boots. Nobody has published an age for this pine, which for a tree of its size is unusual. If you know of a count or a dated record, tell us.
Leggi di più e come arrivare →
3
Dąb 500-lecia
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · Nowe Miasto, Zielona Góra
This oak is named for a five hundredth anniversary, and that is the one thing about it nobody should read as an age. Polish trees are routinely dedicated to anniversaries, the way a Dąb Tysiąclecia marks a millennium, and no source anywhere states how old this one is or how far round its trunk goes.
What is on record is the paperwork. Zielona Góra's city council made it a pomnik przyrody, a natural monument, by resolution of 27 June 2017, published in the Lubuskie voivodeship journal, and the Przytok forest district lists it among the eighteen monumental trees in its care, standing in compartment 21c of the Dąbrowa forestry. It is a pedunculate oak on State Forests ground, open forest land, about six kilometres out from Sulechów and inside the Nowe Miasto district of Zielona Góra.
That thin file is the honest state of it: one municipal act, echoed by the foresters who look after the tree, plus a photograph taken in January 2025 whose GPS tag falls within a few metres of the register's own coordinate. The pin can be trusted; the biography cannot, yet.
So this is a walk into working forest to stand under an oak the state thought worth protecting, without knowing what it has been standing through. If you have put a tape around it, or know which anniversary the name belongs to, tell us.
Leggi di più e come arrivare →