The Apple Tree at U Lidmanu (Jablon u Lidmanu)
How do I find it? You can recognise it by the trunk, about 140 centimetres round, and by the fruit: it is the old apple standing in the garden of the U Lidmanu inn at Machovska Lhota.
In 2020 the Czech Republic gave its Tree of the Year title to an apple tree in an inn's garden. Strom roku normally goes to oaks and limes with several centuries behind them. This one took 2,191 votes, the first fruit tree ever to win it, and the following year it placed seventh in the European vote. It grows at U Lidmanu, a country inn at Machovska Lhota a kilometre from the Polish border, where walkers, cyclists and cross-country skiers stop to eat. It is a Blenheim Rennet, a late apple grown for cooking. Czech Wikipedia dates it to around 1945, the year the war ended, and says it went in the same year as the birth of Jarka Lidman, the inn's long-time owner; a 2020 report called it seventy and measured its trunk at 140 centimetres round. Somewhere near eighty, then, which is a good age for an orchard apple. It nearly did not get there. The story told locally is that the tree was failing until a regular visitor advised burying iron nails around its roots, after which it recovered. In 2026 it is on the ballot again, this time for Tree of the Quarter Century. Which is the whole case for the drive out. Not girth, not centuries, but an ordinary orchard apple that a country voted for.
- Species
- Apple (Malus domestica 'Blenheim Orange')
- Girth
- 1.4 m
- Location
- Garden of Restaurace a Penzion U Lidmanu, Machovska Lhota (village of Machov), Nachod District (Machovska Lhota, near the Polish border)
- Access
- Free to view in the garden of the U Lidmanu restaurant and pension; a working country inn where hikers, cyclists and cross-country skiers commonly stop for food, not a gated private garden. No source explicitly confirms a public right to enter without patronising the inn, so state this plainly on the page.
- Getting there
- Rural village Machovska Lhota (Machov), Nachod District, about 1 km from the Polish border; no rail, reached by local road; nearest larger town is Broumov.
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Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
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