Pastýřský buk (Shepherd's Beech)

Half of this beech is lying on the ground, and both halves are still legally protected. The standing part leans, held together with flexible bindings since the spring of 2015. The fallen part has been left where it came down. It has been going wrong slowly. Heavy icing broke its strongest limb at the end of 2014. Some years later a whole side went over, helped along by Kretzschmaria deusta, a wood decay fungus that blackens a trunk until the tree looks as though it has been through a fire. Sources give the height as 22 metres or as 17, and the lower figure is almost certainly the tree as it is now. The trunk is 5.88 metres round and the crown once spread 21 metres across, which is what a beech does when it grows up alone with nothing to compete with. Nobody has dated it precisely; the estimates run from about 200 to 280 years. That is where it stands, at 807 metres on the edge of the Lazy settlement in the Slavkovský les, out on open grazing land. In the autumn of 2003 it came second in the national Tree of the Year vote. Local story has it growing from a shepherd's staff pushed into the ground during a storm, which sprouted overnight. Nobody claims to have watched.