The Bartoszewski Square Oak

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.