The Botanical Garden Hungarian Oak

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.