The Plane Tree of Komjatice

Nine metres and thirty centimetres round, and a good deal of that bark is carved with initials. Komjatice calls this plane the tree of love, and couples have been adding to it for generations. Slovak coverage routinely calls it the thickest trunk in the country, though a hollow lime at Myjava measures wider still. It clears 28 metres, won the national Strom roka title in 2012 and finished in the top five of the European Tree of the Year the following spring. Its age is given as about 138 years in 2013 reporting and nearly 150 by 2015, so somewhere in that band. Local tradition credits Baron Moric Wodianer, a merchant who stocked the manor grounds with exotics, but the account that records it calls the attribution a supposition rather than a fact. What the tree has lived through is better documented than who planted it. The Grassalkovich manor house beside it was bombed in the war and the park went to seed for decades afterwards. Flood-control excavation in the 1950s took down many of its neighbours. More recently somebody set a fire in one of the cavities in its trunk. The park was rebuilt in 2009 and 2010 and is open to walk through, and the plane is still standing at the middle of it, thicker than anything that was cut down around it.