The Marmontova Lipa

This linden and the garden around it were planted the same year, and both were named for the same brief, foreign occupation. In July 1810, with Ljubljana serving as capital of Napoleon's short-lived Illyrian Provinces, botanist Franc Hladnik founded what is now the oldest continuously operating botanical garden in southeastern Europe, and among its first plantings went in a linden later named for Auguste de Marmont, the French marshal who governed the province. The Illyrian Provinces lasted only four years before Austria took the region back, but Marmontova lipa outlived the empire that named it by two centuries and counting. It remains the garden's single mightiest tree, still shading the same paths Hladnik laid out, in a garden that has run without interruption since a French general's brief and largely forgotten administration. Ljubljana's Botanical Garden was declared a cultural monument of national importance in 2008, two centuries after Marmont's name first got attached to a sapling, by which point the marshal himself was a footnote and the tree had become the point.