Buk u kostela v Jihlavě (Beech by St James's Church)

A group of Jihlava students campaigned this beech to the national Tree of the Year title in the autumn of 2003. Twenty-three years later it is entered again, in a competition for the tree of the quarter century, still standing beside the church of St James the Greater in the middle of town. It is a copper beech, 4.44 metres round, 19 metres tall, with a crown 21.4 metres across, and nobody agrees how old it is. An estimate made in 1994, four years after it was declared a memorial tree, put it at 211 years. Another in 2003 put it at 132. The two readings are of the same trunk, nine years apart, and they differ by almost a century, so take the range and not either end of it. What is not in doubt is the ground it grows out of. A cemetery surrounded this church from the early Middle Ages until the burials moved elsewhere, and the open space around the beech is what was left when they went. However old it turns out to be, it has spent its whole life rooted in a graveyard. It stands in an open public churchyard in central Jihlava, a short walk from the main square, free and reachable at any hour.