Twelve of Krakow's protected trees stand within a few streets of Planty, the park ring where the medieval walls came down, splitting into two short walks: one runs past the ring's biggest plane and ginkgo to a pair of ash trees, the other from a tree of heaven on ul. Swietego Jana to an oak and ginkgo sharing a street on ul. Batorego. Three more grow in Poland's oldest botanical garden, a short walk east. The oldest of all sits six kilometres south, saved by one neighbour.
0 / 38 Krakowで訪れた数
写真：Jerzy Opiola (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
The Jagiellonian Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · around 230 years · Wesola
For generations, guides at Poland's oldest botanical garden told visitors this oak was 500 years old, older than the university faculty that planted the garden around it. A dendrochronological study eventually corrected the number to roughly 230, a reminder that even a garden built by scientists can carry a folk legend for two centuries before anyone tests it properly. The real number is less dramatic but not much less impressive: the tree is very nearly as old as the garden itself, founded in 1783 when the Commission of National Education bought monastic land from the Jesuits to give the Krakow Academy's chemistry and natural history faculty somewhere to grow a teaching collection. Sitting at the heart of that collection ever since, the Jagiellonian Oak has outlived the partitions of Poland, two world wars, and the garden's own repeated redesigns. Its species is the single most common one Krakow protects today, a pedunculate oak among 121 individual specimens registered across the city as of 2023, but this particular tree is the one the garden itself calls its most impressive, trunk now six metres around. It stands for anyone who buys the garden's modest entry ticket, its crown wide enough to shade a good stretch of the main path, still growing quietly while its age keeps getting revised downward by better science.
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写真：Janusz Krzyzek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
The Henryk Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · 240-250 years · Lagiewniki-Borek Falecki
This oak is named after the man who spent decades making sure it did not get cut down, not after anyone who planted it. Henryk Bartyzel, who lived beside the tree from 1923 until his death in 2010, is the reason it survived a felling order from wartime occupation authorities and decades of routine maintenance on what became one of Krakow's busiest streets. The oak itself predates him by more than a century: it is the last survivor of the pine-and-oak forest that once covered the former village of Borek, the same wood that gave the village its name, bor being an old Polish word for pine forest, and it became a roadside tree almost by accident in 1790, when Austrian authorities cut the Vienna-to-Lwow highway straight through the ancient stand shortly after Poland's first partition. Everything else that forest once held is gone; only this oak, now around 240 to 250 years past that road-building, is left standing at its edge. In 2010, a civic council formally named it Henryk in Bartyzel's honour, and in 2017 a community restoration project reopened its surroundings after more than 90 volunteers cleared and replanted the ground around its base. It competed, as Krakow's first entrant, in Poland's national Tree of the Year contest in 2018.
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3
Poland's Oldest Black Locust
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · 239 years · Wesola
Black locusts are not supposed to be rare in Poland. The species arrived from North America in the 18th century and spread so successfully across Central Europe's sandy soils that it now grows practically everywhere, valued for holding loose ground rather than for looking distinguished. Which is what makes the specimen standing in front of Collegium Sniadeckiego, on the Kopernika Street side of the Jagiellonian University's Botanical Garden, worth singling out: at 239 years old by a 2022 measurement, with a trunk 475cm around and a height of 27 metres, it is the oldest confirmed black locust anywhere in Poland. Its age lines up almost exactly with the garden's own founding in 1783, meaning whoever first planted it did so within a few years of the garden's earliest plantings, one of the collection's original survivors rather than a later addition. May brings the reward for anyone who times a visit right: a black locust in full bloom carries heavy clusters of white flowers that draw bees from across the garden, the same nectar that makes the species one of Europe's most productive honey trees. It shares this stretch of path with a run of other exceptionally old specimens dating to the same founding decades, giving one corner of the garden a disproportionate share of Poland's oldest confirmed trees.
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写真：Janusz Krzyzek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4
The Sniadecki Dogwoods
Cornelian Cherry (Cornus mas) · around 230 years · Wesola
Jan Sniadecki was one of the Enlightenment's great Polish polymaths, an astronomer and mathematician who reformed how Krakow's university taught science, and tradition credits him with personally planting these cornelian cherries along the Botanical Garden's main path around 1790, while he was directing the observatory next door. Cornelian cherry is usually grown as a large shrub rather than what most people picture as a tree, which is part of why these specimens stand out: at roughly 230 years old, they are among the oldest cultivated cornelian cherries recorded in Poland, multi-stemmed and gnarled in a way that reads more like an old apple tree than the tidy hedge shrub gardeners plant today. They flower before almost anything else in the garden wakes up, small clusters of yellow blossom opening as early as February while frost is still a real possibility, followed by tart red fruit in late summer that Polish households have turned into preserves and liqueur for centuries. Sniadecki's connection to the garden runs deeper than one planting: the university's astronomical observatory, which he helped establish, still stands in the Collegium building the garden surrounds, and the dogwoods are the closest thing to a living monument to the man himself, unlabelled and easy to walk past without knowing what they are.
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5
The Filharmonia Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · estimated 150 to 270 years, from its girth · Stare Miasto (Planty ring)
Krakow protects ten London planes on the Planty ring, and this is the one that dwarfs the other nine. Its trunk measures 520 centimetres around, comfortably the largest girth in that group, which is what earned it a place on the city's natural monument register in 1997. Nobody has dated it. What exists is the girth, and running that figure through a published growth-factor method puts the tree somewhere between 150 and 270 years old. The band is deliberately wide. The calculation borrows its growth rate from a related American species because no factor for the London plane was found, and a tree standing in a city grows at a speed no formula can know. Read the number as an estimate taken off the trunk rather than a birth year.
The park underneath is better documented than the tree in it. Planty was laid out in the 1820s, after Krakow pulled down its medieval walls and ringed the Old Town with gardens instead. Nothing records when this plane went into that ground. Nor is the register any guarantee of survival: two other protected trees in the same part of the city, a red beech by the Archaeological Museum and a horse chestnut on ul. Podzamcze, were brought down by storms in February 2022 and July 2021.
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写真：Zygmunt Put (CC BY-SA 4.0)
6
The Straszewskiego Ash
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · estimated 150 to 220 years, from its girth · Stare Miasto (Planty ring, west side near Wawel)
European ash is one of the commonest trees in Poland and a thick one is not common at all. This specimen stands on the pavement of ul. Straszewskiego, on the western edge of Planty a few minutes below Wawel, and measures 375 centimetres around. That is what earned it a place on the city's natural monument register in 1987.
Its age is arithmetic rather than record. The girth works out at roughly 119 centimetres of diameter, and a published growth factor returns something near 190 years from that. Two things keep it a range instead of a number. The factor is borrowed from green ash, the closest documented relative that has one, and no tape measure can see what two centuries of drought years, good years and street rebuilding did inside the trunk. Call it 150 to 220 years and leave it there. Only a core sample would settle it.
The species itself has had a hard three decades. A fungal dieback spreading west since the 1990s has thinned ash across Europe, killing young and old trees alike and making veterans of this size less ordinary every year than they used to be. This one is still standing, on a public pavement, free to walk up to at any hour.
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7
The Garncarska Ginkgo
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · Stare Miasto (Planty ring, west side)
Three trunks rise from a single base on ul. Garncarska, and the number the register carries, 275 centimetres, belongs to the largest of them rather than to one trunk. The other two measure 203 and 175. Krakow listed the tree as a natural monument in 1968, decades earlier than most of the entries around it, which suggests somebody thought it unusual long before the modern register caught up.
How old is it? Nobody knows, and here guessing would be worse than saying so. The girth-to-age arithmetic that dates the oaks and limes on this walk needs a growth factor calibrated to the species, and no reliable one exists for ginkgo: the tree thickens at wildly different rates depending on cultivar, site and how much room its roots were given. So the age field stays empty on purpose. If you have seen a planting record for this stretch of Garncarska, or a photograph old enough to help, tell us.
What it does reliably deliver is November. Ginkgo leaves turn from green to a flat butter gold and then let go almost all at once, often within a couple of days, which on a three-stemmed tree of this size means a great deal of gold hitting the pavement in one go.
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8
The Bartoszewski Square Oak
Pedunculate Oak, columnar form (Quercus robur 'Fastigiata') · estimated 140 to 210 years, from its girth · Stare Miasto (Planty ring, north side)
The oak was on the register ten years before the square had a name. Krakow protected it in 2008. The city council voted on 10 October 2018 to name the ground around it after Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a Home Army member who survived Auschwitz, was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations and later served as Poland's foreign minister. It is his square, not his oak. Nothing in the record links the tree to the man beyond the address, and the dates rule out the tidier story.
It is an odd oak in its own right. This is a columnar cultivar of the pedunculate oak, which grows narrow and upright instead of spreading, closer in outline to a poplar than to the wide-crowned oaks most people picture when they hear the word. The trunk is 288 centimetres around, standing where four streets meet at the northern edge of Planty.
Its age is calculated, not recorded. That girth gives about 92 centimetres of diameter, and the published factor for the white oak group returns roughly 180 years. Take the range, 140 to 210, and take it loosely: nobody has documented how fast a columnar cultivar thickens compared with an ordinary oak, which is uncertainty stacked on top of uncertainty.
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9
The Basztowa Turkish Hazel
Turkish Hazel (Corylus colurna) · roughly 50 to 125 years, judged from a trunk 1.65 m round · Stare Miasto (Planty ring, north-east side)
Turkish hazel is not the shrub its name suggests. Corylus colurna is a proper forest tree, native to southeast Europe and Asia Minor, capable of 25 metres and a neat conical crown, which is why cities plant it along streets when they want something tough and tidy. Krakow's protected list runs heavily to oaks, limes and planes, so a hazel on it is an oddity, and this one stands in Planty itself beside ul. Basztowa, close to the main station.
It grows as two stems from one base, 165 and 120 centimetres round. The 165 is the larger stem rather than a single trunk, which is worth stating plainly: the two figures do not add together, and a two-stemmed tree reads as bulkier than either measurement on its own. The city registered it in 2008.
Its age is not known. The growth-factor arithmetic used on the oaks and limes nearby needs a divisor matched to the species, and the only hazel figure in the standard tables is calibrated to common hazel, a multi-stemmed shrub with nothing like this tree's habit. Applying it would produce a number, not an estimate. If anyone holds a planting date for this corner of Planty, we would like to hear it.
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10
The Krowoderska Lime
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · estimated 130 to 175 years, from its girth · Stare Miasto / Krowodrza border, north of the Old Town
Four of the ages on this walk come off a tape measure rather than out of any record, and this is the only one where the arithmetic gets to use the tree's own species. The published growth factor for small-leaved lime is an exact match for what stands at ul. Krowoderska 16: a trunk 402 centimetres round, which converts to about 128 centimetres of diameter and returns roughly 150 years. Even then the honest form is a range, 130 to 175, because a growth factor describes an average lime rather than this one, and this one has spent its whole life in a street.
Poles have a longer relationship with the species than most. Lipa is the Polish name for it, and lipiec, the word for July, comes from the same root, because July is when the lime flowers and the tree fills with bees loud enough to hear from the pavement. Villages planted them at churches and crossroads for centuries.
This one has been protected since 1987 and is a city tree by contrast, on a working street north of the Old Town rather than in the park ring. It marks the far end of the Planty loop, about 1.2 kilometres from the ash on ul. Straszewskiego at the other extreme.
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11
The Studencka Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · estimated 90 to 165 years, from its girth · Piasek, west of the Planty ring (Stare Miasto)
Krakow's biggest registered plane, on the Planty by the Philharmonic, measures 520 centimetres round. The one outside ul. Studencka 25 is a third smaller, 315 centimetres, and still made the city's natural monument register in 1997 on its own merits, a full street away from the Planty ring in the old Piasek district.
Its age is arithmetic rather than record. Working the girth through the growth factor already used for its bigger relative on the Planty, borrowed from American sycamore since no rate has been published for London plane itself, puts it somewhere between 90 and 165 years old. That is a wide bracket on purpose. Nobody has cored the trunk, and a tree growing between a road and a row of nineteenth century apartment blocks answers to the paving and pipes around it as much as to its own species.
London planes were planted through Krakow by the hundreds a century or more ago because almost nothing kills them: not compacted soil, not exhaust, not a hard prune. This one has outlasted whatever stood on Studencka before it, on a street that has changed its own name four times since 1893 while the tree kept growing. Free to walk up to, any hour.
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12
The Kossaka Square Ash
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · estimated 130 to 190 years, from its girth · Piasek, near the Krakow Philharmonic
Plac Kossaka today is better known for parked cars and a kebab stand than for its trees, which is what makes the ash at number 4 easy to miss. It measures 321 centimetres around, entered onto Krakow's natural monument register in 1997, and stands a few streets from the city's other protected ash on ul. Straszewskiego, itself 375 centimetres and estimated at 150 to 220 years old by the same method.
Scaling this tree's girth against that already-published estimate, using the same borrowed growth factor (European ash has none of its own published, so the figure comes from green ash, its closest documented relative), puts the Kossaka tree at roughly 130 to 190 years. Narrower trunk, younger tree, same square kilometre of the city.
European ash is one of the commonest species in Poland, which is exactly why a trunk this thick stands out. The species has also had a hard three decades: a fungal dieback moving west since the 1990s has thinned ash populations across the continent, killing young and old trees indiscriminately. A veteran ash surviving that, on a square used mostly for parking, is a small piece of luck rather than a guarantee. Free and open to the street at any hour.
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13
The Batorego Oak and Ginkgo
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) and Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · west of the Planty ring
Two protected trees stand two doors apart on ul. Batorego, a pedunculate oak at number 14 and a ginkgo at number 12, both entered onto Krakow's natural monument register on the same day in 1997. The oak is the thicker of the two, 336 centimetres around; the ginkgo measures 305.
Neither has a documented age, and this is one case where guessing off the girth would mislead rather than help. Oak and ginkgo do not share a growth pattern with the ash and plane already published nearby, and no reliable published growth factor for either species in this climate was found this pass. What is verified is simpler and enough on its own: two long-lived species, planted close enough together to have been a deliberate pairing rather than a coincidence, both still standing on an ordinary residential street.
Ginkgo is the more unusual of the two. Native to China and unrelated to any other tree alive today, the species survived the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs, and six ginkgos close to the 1945 blast at Hiroshima resprouted from scorched trunks and still stand there. This one has had an easier life, on a Krakow pavement, free to see at any hour.
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14
The Sikorskiego Square Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 100 to 200 years, judged from a trunk 2.63 m round · Piasek, west of the Old Town
Plac Sikorskiego's oak is the youngest addition to Krakow's register among the trees on this page, protected in 2007 rather than in the 1997 batch that covers most of the others. Its girth, 263 centimetres, is also the smallest of the pedunculate oaks the city protects near its centre, behind both the columnar oak on Skwer Bartoszewskiego and the Jagiellonian and Henryk oaks published elsewhere on this walk.
No age has been published for it, and running an ordinary pedunculate oak's girth through a growth factor table is a riskier bet than for species like ash or plane on this list. A standard-form oak's growth rate varies more with soil, light and pruning history than almost anything else here, and no comparably grown oak from the same register gives a safe baseline to scale from. Better to leave the number out than guess at one.
What is certain is the trunk itself, thick enough at 263 centimetres to be a genuine veteran by any reasonable account, standing on a square named for the Polish general and prime minister in exile Wladyslaw Sikorski, who died in a plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943. Free to see at any hour.
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15
The Tarlowska Lime
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · estimated 85 to 115 years, from its girth · Stare Miasto, near the Planty ring
Krakow already protects one small-leaved lime on this page, a 402 centimetre trunk on ul. Krowoderska whose age comes out at 130 to 175 years by the species' own published growth factor, an unusually exact match between the tape measure and the science. The lime on ul. Tarlowska is the smaller of the city's two, 259 centimetres round, entered onto the register in 2004, seventeen years after most of the trees on this walk.
Running the same growth factor against this thinner trunk gives a range of roughly 85 to 115 years, which would put its planting somewhere in the interwar years or just after, plausible for a street lime on a residential road rebuilt more than once since. As with its bigger relative, the number is arithmetic rather than record: nobody has cored it, and the bracket stays wide on purpose.
Small-leaved lime was the tree cities across Central Europe reached for through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tolerant of pollution, easy to pollard, long-lived enough to still be standing when the street around it has changed shape several times over. This one is free to walk up to on ul. Tarlowska at any hour.
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16
The Sw. Jana Tree of Heaven
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) · Stare Miasto (Old Town core, between the Main Square and the Planty)
Ulica Swietego Jana runs from the Main Square to the Planty, one of the most walked streets in the Old Town, and the tree registered at number 30 is a species most European cities spend money trying to remove. Ailanthus altissima, tree of heaven, seeds into any crack in the pavement, sends up suckers under paving stones and shades out whatever grew there first, fast enough to reach a serious size within a single lifetime. Krakow protects this one anyway, entered onto the natural monument register in 1997 for a trunk 292 centimetres around.
That speed is exactly why no age is published here. A growth factor that works for an oak or a lime tells you nothing about a tree that can add a metre of height in a good year. Dublin's own registered tree of heaven carries an official estimate of 120 to 165 years that the species' own growth pattern argues should be closer to 70 or 100. Rather than repeat that kind of guess, this page states the girth and leaves the age open.
What is not in doubt is the tree itself, standing on one of Krakow's busiest historic streets, growing well before anyone thought to protect it.
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17
The Franciszkanska Ginkgo
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · Stare Miasto (Old Town), beside the Franciscan church
Nobody has measured this ginkgo's age, but its trunk gives away that it is old enough to fruit, a milestone the species does not reach for about forty years. It grows on ul. Franciszkanska beside the Church of the Franciscans in the Old Town, a two hundred and fifty eight centimetre trunk standing where monks have kept a garden for centuries.
Poland's national register of natural monuments lists the tree's protection as dating from 1998; the city's own official list, reproduced on Polish Wikipedia, gives 1997 for this tree and several others nearby, a discrepancy that most likely traces to a province-wide reconfirmation regulation rather than a disagreement about the tree itself. Both dates are recorded here rather than picked between.
Ginkgo biloba survived in cultivation around temple grounds in East Asia for centuries before European gardens took it up, and it tends to end up beside old religious buildings for the same reason it did here: nobody with authority over sacred ground had reason to cut down something that was simply doing well. No age has been established for this specimen. If you know one, tell us.
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18
The Powroznicza Red Oak
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · Podgórze, in the garden of the Podgórska Biblioteka Publiczna (district public library)
Krakow's monumental trees are almost all native oaks and limes, which makes this one an outlier twice over: a Northern Red Oak, a North American species, growing in the garden of a public library. The building itself has its own history worth knowing before the tree. Built as a villa in the late 1880s and once purchased for the painter Jan Matejko's daughter Beata, it has served as Podgorze district's public library since 1988, which is what keeps its garden open rather than walled off as someone's private grounds.
The oak's trunk measures three metres fourteen around, big enough that Poland's national register protects it as a natural monument, though the register itself carries no age. Its protection date is recorded two ways, 1987 in the national database and 1997 in the city's own list, likely the gap between an original designation and a later province-wide reconfirmation rather than a real dispute.
A honey locust stands twelve metres away in the same garden, registered alongside it under the same library grounds. No age has been established for either, and an introduced ornamental species like this one has no reliable local growth rate to estimate from. If you know one, tell us.
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19
The Powroznicza Honey Locust
Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) · Podgórze, in the garden of the Podgórska Biblioteka Publiczna (district public library)
Twelve metres from the library's red oak stands its quieter neighbour, a honey locust with a trunk two metres twenty three around, one of relatively few of its species protected anywhere in Krakow as a natural monument. Both trees share the same garden, the grounds of the Podgorze district public library, a villa built in the 1880s that has kept its grounds open to the public since it became a library in 1988.
Gleditsia triacanthos is a North American species, armed in the wild with vicious branching thorns that cultivated street and garden specimens are usually bred without, and it took to European ornamental planting in the nineteenth century the way its oak neighbour did. Poland's national register protects it on species and location alone, with no girth or age recorded there; the city's own official list adds the measurement.
The two protection dates disagree by a decade, 1987 nationally against 1997 in the city record, in the same pattern as its neighbour and several other Krakow trees this pass checked, most likely a province wide reconfirmation rather than two different true dates. No age has been established. If you know one, tell us.
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20
The Kosciuszki Silver Lime
Silver Lime (Tilia tomentosa) · roughly 130 to 190 years · Krowodrza
Krakow already has one small leaved lime on this list whose age comes from an unusually exact match between a tape measure and the published science: the Krowoderska Lime, four hundred and two centimetres round, dated to 130 to 175 years by the species' own documented growth rate. This tree, on the same street, is a different species entirely, a silver lime, and its own trunk has grown even thicker: four hundred and twenty four centimetres.
No document records when it was planted, so its age here is derived rather than measured: applying the growth rate this city's own lime data already established, widened to allow for the difference between species, puts it at roughly 130 to 190 years old. That is an estimate from girth, not a planting record, and the wide band is the honest shape of that kind of arithmetic.
Poland's national register dates its protection to 1975; the city's own list gives 1997, the same reconfirmation-year pattern seen elsewhere on this page. It stands on ul. Kosciuszki in Krowodrza, visible from the public street, served by two city bus routes.
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21
The Daszynskiego Lime
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · roughly 85 to 130 years · Śródmieście, on the Daszyńskiego avenue
This lime is the youngest of three different Tilia species this page now protects, and the arithmetic that ages it borrows from the other two. Krakow's own small leaved limes gave a documented growth rate for this climate; applied to this tree's two hundred and eighty four centimetre trunk, with room left for the uncertainty of crossing species, it comes out at roughly 85 to 130 years. That is an estimate built from girth, not a planting date, and the width of the range is the honest price of that method.
Unlike its neighbours on this page, this large leaved lime carries an exact and recent paper trail: Krakow's city council protected it by name in a resolution dated 16 December 2015, entered into the national register three weeks later. No thirty year gap between two dates here, just the ordinary lag between a vote and its paperwork.
It grows on Aleja Daszynskiego in Srodmiescie, a wide tram lined avenue rather than a park, doing the quiet work street trees do: six tram lines run past it, and Wikimedia Commons already has a photograph of it standing there among the traffic.
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22
The Bednarski Park Black Walnut
Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) · not documented · Podgorze
Krakow's register of natural monuments holds exactly one black walnut, and this is it. The city recorded 298 centimetres of trunk when it granted the tree protection in February 2017.
The species belongs to the river valleys of eastern North America, not to a Polish hillside, and it is here because the park around it was built to show things off. Park Bednarskiego was laid out inside a worked-out limestone quarry from the 1890s, its terraces planted with what the city had little of: tulip tree, tree of heaven, this walnut. The garden section it stands in is called Szkola Twardowskiego, the school of Twardowski, after the sorcerer whose workshop local legend placed in the quarry basin.
Black walnut makes its case in autumn. The fruit comes down in green husks the size of tennis balls, and the pulp inside stains hands, gloves and paving a brown that does not wash off.
The whole park closed for rebuilding in January 2022 and reopened on 27 April 2023, the work written up as keeping the existing old growth standing. This tree came through it.
Nobody has recorded its age. The park was planted in more than one campaign and no source ties this trunk to any of them. If you know when it went in, tell us.
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23
The Bednarski Park Larch
European Larch (Larix decidua) · not documented · Podgorze
The slope this larch grows on was fenced, guarded and shut to the public for roughly half a century. Park Bednarskiego planted its western side as woodland between 1902 and 1909, named the section Zalesienie, and then kept people out of it with high fines for trespassing. It opened to walkers only in the 1950s, decades after the rest of the park was in daily use.
The tree is also the only European larch on Krakow's list of natural monuments. The city recorded 223 centimetres of trunk when it protected the tree in February 2017, in the same council resolution that covered three of its neighbours in this park.
Larch is the conifer that does not stay green. Soft needles in little bunches, fresh green in April, gold through late October, and by December nothing at all: a bare grey frame standing among evergreens that kept theirs. Almost nothing else in a European park does that, and it is the reason to come here in November rather than in July.
No age is recorded for it anywhere, and the park's own planting history is not specific enough to supply one honestly. If you know this tree's story, we would like to hear it. The park closed for a full rebuild in 2022 and reopened in April 2023 with its old growth kept in place, so what you walk up to is the tree the register measured.
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24
The Bednarski Park Ash
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · not documented · Podgorze
Krakow protects three European ashes, and this is the only one that does not grow out of a pavement. The other two stand on ul. Straszewskiego and on Plac Kossaka, thicker trunks but boxed in by kerbs and parked cars. This one has a park around it.
It measures 278 centimetres round, the figure the city entered when it added the tree to the register in February 2017. Ash is the species that gives Park Bednarskiego its shape: jesiony line the Aleja Okrezna, the circular promenade that carries walkers around the old quarry basin, and this is the trunk the register picked out of the row.
The ground is worth knowing about before you get there. The park is a worked-out limestone quarry turned into a public garden from the 1890s, terraced where the stone had been cut away, so everything growing here is standing on an industrial site that was given back. The city rebuilt the park between January 2022 and April 2023 and wrote the old trees into the specification, which is why the promenade still has its ash.
No record gives this tree an age, and the park's history is not precise enough to settle it without guessing. A tape measure round the trunk at chest height would get us closer than any document we have found. If you have one, tell us what it says.
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25
The Bednarski Park Sycamore Maple
Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) · not documented · Podgorze
The city's register carries this maple under two numbers, 204 centimetres and 191, because it has two trunks rather than one. That is the register being careful, and it is also the easiest way to find the tree: among the maples on this slope, look for the one going up as a pair.
Sycamore is a mountain species, the maple of the Carpathians and the Alps, and it makes timber size on thin stony ground where most broadleaves give up. Park Bednarskiego, cut into a limestone quarry above Podgorze and planted from the 1890s, is that kind of ground. Three maple species grow here and this is the klon jawor, the one whose bark flakes off in plates as it ages, leaving the trunk mottled like a plane tree.
It was protected in February 2017, one of four trees in this single garden that Krakow put on the natural monument register in one council resolution, alongside a black walnut, a European larch and an ash. Four monuments inside one park, which is why this hillside is worth an afternoon rather than a detour.
Nobody has dated it, and no source says whether it was planted here or seeded itself, which sycamore does readily. If you know more about this one, tell us.
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26
The Kosciuszki Norway Maple
Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) · not documented · Debniki
Norway maple is the tree Krakow plants when it simply needs a tree. It lines streets all over the city, which is what makes a protected one strange: in 2020 the council entered this specimen at ul. Kosciuszki 18 on the register of natural monuments, at 210 centimetres round.
The girth is the whole case. Street maples are pruned back, hemmed in under paving and usually replaced long before they thicken, so a trunk over two metres round on an open pavement is not what the species normally manages in a city.
It is also the second monument on this stretch of road. The Kosciuszki Silver Lime, twice as thick at 424 centimetres, stands about 115 metres along the same street, so the two are one short walk rather than two separate trips.
April is the moment worth turning up for. Norway maple flowers before it leafs, and the bare crown fills with clusters of acid yellow-green that read, on a grey Krakow street, as the first colour of the year. A broken leaf stalk bleeds milky white, which is how the species is told from the sycamore it otherwise resembles.
No age is on record. The register is interested in the measurement rather than the year, and nobody has published a figure. If you know when this one went in, tell us.
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写真：Zygmunt Put (CC BY-SA 4.0)
27
The Karmelicka Elm
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · roughly 100 to 200 years, judged from a trunk 2.9 m round · Piasek
Elms are the trees Europe mostly lost, which is why a protected one standing on a working Krakow street is worth the quarter hour it takes to walk out from the Main Square. This is a European white elm, wiaz szypulkowy in Polish, on the pavement outside ul. Karmelicka 51 in Piasek, a few streets west of the Planty ring. Its trunk measures 290 centimetres around.
The species belongs to wet ground, river floodplains and old flood terraces rather than dry city verges. It gives itself away in early spring, before the leaves: the flowers and then the seeds hang out on long stalks, which is what the Polish name records, and every flat seed case is fringed with fine white hairs.
Poland's national register dates the protection to 1998. The city's own published list says 1997. Both entries carry the same register number and the same girth, so what disagrees is a year on paper rather than the identity of the tree.
Nobody has recorded its age. The register holds a girth and an address and nothing else, and no other dated white elm in this city offers anything to measure it against. If you know when this one went into the pavement, tell us.
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28
The Morawskiego Elm
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · roughly 150 to 300 years, judged from a trunk 3.99 m round · Zwierzyniec
At 399 centimetres round, this is the thickest elm on this list, and the two sources describing it cannot agree on when Poland decided to protect it. The national register says 1987. The city's own published list says 1997. Both quote the same register number and the same girth to the centimetre, so this is one tree wearing two dates, and the decade between them is a slip in somebody's transcription rather than a question about which elm is meant.
It is a European white elm at ul. Morawskiego 5 in Zwierzyniec, the quarter that runs west from the Old Town toward the Vistula and the Kosciuszko Mound, about fifteen minutes from the Main Square on foot. Four metres of circumference works out at a trunk roughly 127 centimetres across, which is a lot of elm to meet on a residential street anywhere in Europe. Of the continent's native elms, this is the species that the bark beetles carrying Dutch elm disease tend to pass over.
Nobody has dated it. No planting record exists, and no comparable dated white elm stands in this city to measure the girth against, so the register's protection year is the oldest fixed point there is. If you know when it went in, tell us.
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写真：Zygmunt Put (CC BY-SA 4.0)
29
The Pilsudskiego Lime
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) · roughly 130 years, estimated from its girth against Krakow's other register limes · near Blonia / Nowy Swiat
Krakow did not put this lime on its register of natural monuments until December 2013, by which time it had been standing on ul. Pilsudskiego for well over a century. Nothing records the planting. What exists is a tape measure: 339 centimetres round.
That number can be read here, because two other small-leaved limes on this page come from the same register and were dated the same way. Krowoderska is 402 centimetres and reads as 130 to 175 years, Tarlowska is 259 and reads as 85 to 115. Slotting 339 between them gives roughly 110 to 150 years, an estimate taken off a trunk rather than a birth date, and the width of the band is the honest shape of that arithmetic.
Three lime species stand on this page, so it is worth knowing which one you have. Small-leaved lime carries the smallest leaf of the group, heart-shaped and blue-green underneath with rust-coloured tufts of hair in the vein angles. The silver lime on ul. Kosciuszki flashes white undersides in wind, and the large-leaved lime on ul. Daszynskiego has a bigger leaf, soft with hairs.
It stands on the way down to the Blonia, about seven hundred metres from both the Straszewskiego Ash and the Kosciuszki Silver Lime, so it joins a loop rather than making a trip of its own.
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写真：Zygmunt Put (CC BY-SA 4.0)
30
The Strzelecki Garden Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 170 years, estimated from its girth against Krakow's other register planes · Wesola
Krakow's main railway station has an old plane tree for a neighbour, 420 centimetres round, standing in a park most arriving passengers walk straight past. The Ogrod Strzelecki is a public garden beside the nineteenth-century hall of the city's marksmen's society, about a quarter of an hour east of the Main Square on foot.
The two lists that carry the tree disagree on when it was protected. The national register says December 1966, the city's own published list says 1997. Same register number, same girth to the centimetre, so this is one tree with two dates on it rather than two trees.
Its age comes off the trunk, because nothing records a planting. This page already carries two other London planes measured by the same register: the Filharmonia Plane at 520 centimetres, read as 150 to 270 years, and the Studencka Plane at 315 centimetres, read as 90 to 165. Placing 420 between them gives roughly 120 to 220 years. The band is wide on purpose, since a plane in a city grows at whatever rate the city allows it.
The species is a seventeenth-century hybrid, oriental plane crossed with American sycamore, and it turned out to tolerate soot, paving and hard pruning better than anything else on offer. That is why it lines streets from London to Krakow, and why one of them ended up shading a garden next to a railway terminus.
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31
The Wola Justowska Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 125 to 250 years, judged from a trunk 3.51 m round · Wola Justowska
This is one of the newest names on Krakow's monument register, a list whose earliest entries reach back to the 1960s. The national record enters the oak in January 2016, the city's own list says 2015, and the two agree on everything else, including a trunk of 351 centimetres.
It stands at the junction of ul. Dunin-Wasowicza and ul. Lowiecka in Wola Justowska, the villa district on the western edge of the city, on the way out to the woods of Las Wolski. That is about twenty minutes on foot from the Main Square and a little off the run of the other trees here, so treat it as its own stop rather than a link in a chain.
Pedunculate oak is named for its acorns, which hang out on long stalks while the leaves sit almost flat against the twig with two small lobes curling back at the base like ears. It is also the oak of Polish national memory, the species behind Bartek and the Rogalin veterans.
Nobody has recorded its age. No planting record survives for a suburban junction, and the other register oaks in this city carry no age either, so there is nothing local to measure 351 centimetres against. Someone who has lived on that corner for fifty years knows more than the register does. If that is you, tell us.
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32
The Botanical Garden Hungarian Oak
Hungarian Oak (Quercus frainetto) · roughly 175 to 350 years, judged from a trunk 4.62 m round · Wesola
The Hungarian oak is a tree of the Balkans and the Carpathian basin, and Krakow sits several hundred kilometres north of anywhere it grows on its own. This one, inside the Jagiellonian University's Botanical Garden, measures 462 centimetres round and joined Poland's register of natural monuments in February 2017.
Dab wegierski is the Polish name for it. The leaf is the giveaway, and the reason to look up rather than at the trunk: among the largest of any European oak, half again as long as the pedunculate oak leaves elsewhere on this page, cut into many narrow lobes and bunched toward the ends of the shoots.
The garden around it was founded in 1783 and is the oldest in Poland, and this corner of it holds an unusual concentration of old trees. The Jagiellonian Oak, the oldest confirmed black locust in the country and the Sniadecki dogwoods all stand within a couple of hundred metres of it, which makes one ticket buy four entries on this page.
Nothing records when the oak went in, and no other dated tree of its species in Poland gives a way to read that girth, so the age stays open rather than guessed at. The garden charges admission and keeps seasonal hours, so check them before making the twenty minute walk east from the Main Square.
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33
The Botanical Garden Canary Palm
Canary Island Date Palm (Phoenix canariensis) · Wesola
Poland's oldest palm tree lives indoors in Krakow, in a greenhouse used for concerts in summer. The city's own tourism pages give the title to this Canary Island date palm in the winter house of the Jagiellonian University's Botanical Garden.
It has been a protected natural monument since December 2014, with a stem 172 centimetres round. That figure will not date it, and nothing else does either. Palms have no cambium and lay down no annual rings, and the trunk reaches close to its final thickness early and then goes up rather than out, so the tape measure that dates the oaks and limes on this page is no use at all here.
Phoenix canariensis comes from the Canary Islands and would not last a Krakow February outdoors, which is the entire reason it is under glass. It is one of two trees on this page you visit with a roof over your head, the other being the cycad in the palm house nearby. Entry is ticketed and the glasshouses keep their own hours, which are worth checking before the walk out.
Nobody publishes a planting year. The garden and the city both call it the oldest in the country and stop there. If you have seen a date on a label or in a garden catalogue, tell us and we will add it.
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34
The Botanical Garden Cycad
Queen Sago (Cycas circinalis) · at least 162 years, recorded at the garden since 1864 · Wesola
The botanical garden's logo is a portrait of one of its own residents, and this is the resident: a Cycas circinalis under glass in the palm house of the Jagiellonian University's Botanical Garden, part of what the city calls the oldest cycad collection in Poland.
It was recorded here in 1864. That is a first mention rather than a planting date, which makes it a floor and not an age: at least 162 years on this site, and probably more, since the record marks when somebody wrote the plant down rather than when it started growing. No source offers an upper figure, so none is given here.
A cycad is not a tree and is not closely related to one. The lineage was already old when the first flowering plants appeared, and what looks like a trunk is a caudex, a squat storage column that thickens very slowly. The register measures it at 108 centimetres round, a number that stands for a great deal of time rather than for a large plant.
The garden says it flowers every year, which for a cycad means a cone rather than a blossom, and it is that annual performance that put the plant on the institution's own letterhead.
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35
The Beliny-Prazmowskiego Dawn Redwood
Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) · roughly 50 to 75 years · Grzegorzki
This species was described from fossils before anybody found a living one. Until 1941 the dawn redwood existed for Western science as an imprint in rock and nothing else; then living stands were identified in central China, and seed reached gardens outside the country around 1947. That history puts a hard ceiling on the tree outside number 38 on al. Beliny-Prazmowskiego. No specimen of its kind in Poland can be much more than seventy-five years old, and this one already carried two metres of girth when the Malopolskie voivode made it a protected natural monument in April 2004, which places it somewhere between fifty and seventy-five years. Young for this list, and old for a species that spent the twentieth century starting again.
It is a deciduous conifer, which is the thing to watch for. Soft flat needles come out pale green in spring, hold all summer, turn rust and fall, and the tree stands through the Krakow winter as a bare fluted spike among evergreens that keep theirs. The trunk folds and buttresses at the base as these do with age.
Two records carry it, the national register of natural monuments and the city's own list of protected trees, and neither says who planted it or when. If you know, tell us.
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36
The Jordan Park Black Poplar
Black Poplar (Populus nigra) · roughly 90 to 140 years · Czarna Wies / Krowodrza
The first public playground in Europe opened on this ground in 1889, and the poplar on the ul. Reymonta side of the park is old enough that it might have been there to watch. Dr Henryk Jordan laid the place out so that the children of Krakow had somewhere to run and play games in the open, the first of its kind in the city and the first anywhere on the continent. It has been free and ungated ever since.
Whether the tree predates the park is genuinely unsettled, and the honest answer is that nobody has dated it. Its trunk measures 402 cm around on the city's list of protected trees, and black poplars put on girth much faster than the oaks and limes people mentally compare a four-metre trunk against. That gives a broad ninety to a hundred and forty years, a band which straddles 1889 rather than settling it. The tree became a protected natural monument in 2010.
What it does not leave in doubt is the species. Black poplar bark ridges into thick vertical cords with age, and the leaves are triangular on long flattened stalks, so the crown rustles in wind that barely moves anything else around it. If anyone holds a dated planting record for this corner of the park, we would like to see it.
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37
The Serkowskiego Square White Poplar
White Poplar (Populus alba) · roughly 90 to 150 years · Podgorze
Four and a half metres of trunk, on a square almost no visitor to Krakow crosses the river to see. Plac Emila Serkowskiego is an ordinary public square in Stare Podgorze, one bridge and twenty-five minutes from the Main Square, and the white poplar standing on it has been a protected natural monument since 1997.
White poplars announce themselves in a breeze. Every leaf is covered underneath in dense white felt, so a gust turns the whole crown from green to silver and back, and the bark is pale grey, pocked low down with dark diamond-shaped marks and furrowing toward the base. They also grow quickly, which is why 450 cm of circumference does not buy the age the same figure would buy on an oak. The estimate here is a wide ninety to a hundred and fifty years, worked from the girth the city's register recorded rather than from a planting document, because no planting document has turned up.
That is most of what is known about it. Two written records mention the tree, the national register and the city list that reproduces it, and both run to about three lines. What neither conveys is the scale: a poplar allowed to reach four and a half metres round on a city square is not a common sight. If somebody has a date for it, we would take it.
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38
The Westerplatte French Maple
French Maple (Acer monspessulanum) · Stare Miasto
Krakow's newest protected tree is a maple from the Mediterranean, and the city asked its residents about it first. Acer monspessulanum grows wild on dry limestone slopes from Spain to the Caucasus and is almost never planted on a Central European street, where the maples are Norway and sycamore. This one stands on ul. Westerplatte, hard against the Planty, the ring of park laid out on the ground the medieval city walls once held.
In September 2025 the city put five candidate trees out to public consultation: two beeches, an ash, an oak and this klon francuski. The consultation closed in early October, and the tree's entry in the national register of natural monuments is dated 6 June 2026, which makes it one of the most recently protected trees in the city.
Nobody has published a measurement of it. The register gives a species, a coordinate and a date and stops there; the local reporting on the consultation named the tree and did not measure it either. So there is no girth here and no age. French maple leaves are small, leathery and three-lobed, a fraction of the size of the Norway maple leaves further along the same walk, and the species does not make a giant, so the case for the ten minutes from the Main Square is the rarity rather than the scale. If you pass it with a tape measure, send us the number.
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