Dąb Fabrykant (the Factory Owner's Oak, also called Jagosz)

In 2023 an oak in an ordinary Łódź city park won European Tree of the Year with 45,718 votes, having taken the Polish national title the year before. What people were voting for is a shape. The main limbs leave the trunk almost horizontally about a metre and a half off the ground and then keep going, until the crown spans more than 30 metres over a trunk only 458 centimetres round. It spent its life growing outwards rather than upwards. Fabrykant means factory owner. The botanist Jan Teofil Siciński proposed the name for a tree standing in the middle of the city the textile magnates built; locally it also answers to Jagosz. Somebody has been keeping track of it for decades: 330 centimetres round in 1961, about 455 to 460 by 2009. Best estimates put it between 150 and 200 years old. In December 2013 the storm named Ksawery brought one of the big limbs down and the fire brigade was called out. The rest are now braced and supported, and the tree is lit after dark. It has been a protected natural monument since 1990, reaffirmed by the city council in 2015. For a continental champion it leads a plain life. Park im. ks. bp. Michała Klepacza sits on the border of Polesie and Śródmieście, a short walk from the centre. No ticket, no fence, just people crossing the grass under thirty metres of horizontal oak.