On the bank of the mill pond at Hrádek, four kilometres outside Sušice, stands an oak that was growing before the Thirty Years' War ended. The Hrádecký dub is a pedunculate oak put at 400 to 440 years old, 28 metres tall, with a crown twenty metres wide and a trunk over four metres round. It has been a protected memorial tree since 1978, and a Czech tourism guide last updated in 2021 describes it as a massive tree in good condition. Free, on open ground by the water.
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Hrádecký dub
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 400-440 years · Hrádek u Sušice, about 4km from Sušice
This oak was a sapling while the Thirty Years' War was tearing through Bohemia. Czech Wikipedia puts it at about 440 years old; a Czech tourism site says nearer 400. Neither says how the number was reached, so read it as a range rather than a birthday, but either end of it lands the tree's first years before 1648.
What is not in doubt is the size. It stands 28 metres tall with a crown twenty metres wide, on the bank of the mill pond at Hrádek, four kilometres outside Sušice. It has been a protected memorial tree since 1978, and the tourism site, last updated in 2021, calls it a truly massive tree in good condition.
The trunk is over four metres round, though exactly how far over depends on whom you ask. The Czech memorial-tree register's figure is 411 centimetres; Wikipedia quotes 485 from a 2012 measurement under the same register number. They cannot both describe the same day's measurement, and if you have a tape and a spare minute at chest height, we would like to know which is closer.
There is no legend attached and no famous visitor on record. What there is, is a pedunculate oak that has stood over the same water for four centuries, through wars and a working pond's ordinary seasons, and it still carries a full crown. Czech Wikipedia names two more protected limes nearby, the Hrádecká lípa and the Lešišovská lípa, which we have not yet checked ourselves.
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