The Kozy Plane Tree (Platan Klonolistny)

One tree beat out roughly 480 others growing right beside it to become Poland's tree of the year. In 2012 the ecological group Klub Gaja crowned this plane the winner of its national Drzewo Roku contest, picked from the crowded grounds of the Czecz Palace park in Kozy. It has been called Platan Klonolistny since, plane leaved like a maple, though most visitors just point at the biggest tree in the park. It has stood here since before the palace took its current shape. The grounds were laid out in the English style following the building's 1839 rebuilding, and from 1880 until the end of the Second World War the whole estate belonged to the Czecz de Lindenwald family. The park fell quiet for decades afterward and was restored between 2011 and 2015, and it now hosts open-air cultural events among its hundreds of trees. At over 200 years old, 482 centimetres round and 16 metres tall, the plane predates the family that gave the palace its name and has outgrown every one of its four-hundred-odd neighbours. The park is free and open, on ul. Bielska, and the tree stands close to the palace outbuildings, the library and the chapel.