The Sikorskiego Square Oak

Plac Sikorskiego's oak is the youngest addition to Krakow's register among the trees on this page, protected in 2007 rather than in the 1997 batch that covers most of the others. Its girth, 263 centimetres, is also the smallest of the pedunculate oaks the city protects near its centre, behind both the columnar oak on Skwer Bartoszewskiego and the Jagiellonian and Henryk oaks published elsewhere on this walk. No age has been published for it, and running an ordinary pedunculate oak's girth through a growth factor table is a riskier bet than for species like ash or plane on this list. A standard-form oak's growth rate varies more with soil, light and pruning history than almost anything else here, and no comparably grown oak from the same register gives a safe baseline to scale from. Better to leave the number out than guess at one. What is certain is the trunk itself, thick enough at 263 centimetres to be a genuine veteran by any reasonable account, standing on a square named for the Polish general and prime minister in exile Wladyslaw Sikorski, who died in a plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943. Free to see at any hour.