Four of these ten trees stand on one square, London planes each named for a Poznan botanist, protected in 2023 after acoustic scans checked what was solid inside their trunks. Two more, in Cytadela Park, are named for opposing generals from the 1945 battle fought there. The rest stand apart: a castle courtyard plane, a fine silver maple, a striking plane in Park Wilsona, and Krzysztof, an oak of up to 300 years behind nothing but a playground fence in Wilda.
0 of 10 visited in Poznan
1
The Hejnowicz Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 100-125 years · Stare Miasto (Old Town), central Poznan
Before Poznan gave these four planes legal protection, it listened to them. The city's climate and environment department commissioned a dendrological survey that included acoustic tomography, sound pushed through the trunk to map solid wood from rot, and all four came back in good to very good condition with a low risk of dropping limbs. On 16 May 2023 the council made them pomniki przyrody, natural monuments, at the request of the Stare Miasto district council, and gave each one a name instead of a number. This is the Hejnowicz Plane, for Professor Alina Hejnowicz. It stands at the eastern end of the group, roughly thirty metres from its nearest neighbour, and belongs to a set measured at between twenty and twenty-three and a half metres tall. They went into the ground at the start of the twentieth century, which puts their planting close to the moment the square itself changed identity: Prussian Wilhelmsplatz until 1918, Plac Wolnosci, Freedom Square, ever since. Neither the national register nor the city's announcement gives a girth for any of the four, so none is published here. The register entry was formalised on 9 June 2023, three weeks after the vote.
Read more and get directions →
2
The Stecki Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 100-125 years · Stare Miasto (Old Town), central Poznan
This tree carries a professor's name because a district council asked for it. In May 2023 the Stare Miasto district put in a request, and the city council designated four London planes on Plac Wolnosci as natural monuments, attaching to each the name of a botanist or plant sociologist who had worked in Poznan. This one is Konstanty Stecki's. It stands at the north-west corner of the group, about thirty metres west of the Hejnowicz Plane and roughly the same distance north of the close pair on the southern side. The square around it is one of the more consequential rectangles in Polish history. The Bazar hotel at its northern end is where Ignacy Jan Paderewski spoke from a window on 26 December 1918, the evening the Greater Poland Uprising began, and the colonnade of the Raczynski Library has faced the same square since 1829. Whether this plane was already standing for Paderewski's speech is not something anyone has written down: the city dates the four only to the start of the twentieth century, which straddles the year. What is recorded is its health, checked by acoustic tomography before designation and found good to very good.
Read more and get directions →
3
The Paczoski Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 100-125 years · Stare Miasto (Old Town), central Poznan
One of the four protected planes on Plac Wolnosci is named after the man who coined the word phytosociology. Jozef Paczoski, born 1864, argued that plants should be studied as societies rather than as individual specimens, gave that idea its name in the 1890s, and spent his later career teaching in Poznan. The city attached his name to this tree on 16 May 2023, when the council designated all four planes on the square as natural monuments at the district council's request. It is the eastern of the two that stand six metres apart on the southern side of the square, which is close enough that a visitor needs to know which is which. The four went in at the start of the twentieth century and stand between twenty and twenty-three and a half metres tall. Before protecting them the city had them surveyed with acoustic tomography, which reads the density of wood inside a living trunk without opening it, and all four came back sound with a low risk of failure. Poland's national register records the designation, the species and the position, and carries no field for girth or age, so neither is published here.
Read more and get directions →
4
The Kulesza Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 100-125 years · Stare Miasto (Old Town), central Poznan
Plac Wolnosci has four legally protected trees and all four are the same species. They are London planes, the tree European cities reach for when the ground is paved, the air is exhaust and the roots have nowhere generous to go. Rather than number them, Poznan gave each a name: this is the Kulesza Plane, for Professor Witold Kulesza, designated with the other three on 16 May 2023 and entered in the national register three weeks later. It is the western of the pair that stand six metres apart along the southern side, the closest two of the group. The square it stands on runs as a long open rectangle between the Bazar hotel and the neoclassical front of the Raczynski Library, and it has been the city's ceremonial ground under two states and three names. The trees arrived at the start of the twentieth century, when the paving and the traffic around them were both lighter. Their condition is documented rather than assumed: the city commissioned a dendrological survey with acoustic tomography before the vote, and the four were found in good to very good health with a low risk of breakage.
Read more and get directions →
5
The Abakanowicz Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 190 years · Centrum Kultury Zamek grounds, central Poznan
This plane was already about seventy years old when the Kaiser's builders turned up next door. Poznan puts its age at roughly 190 years and its trunk at 411 centimetres round, the figures published when the council made it a natural monument on 16 April 2024. Wilhelm II's residence, the vast castle now running as the Zamek cultural centre, went up between 1905 and 1910, on ground where this tree was already mature. It stands in the Dziedziniec Rozany, the Rose Courtyard, tucked between the castle and the Arsenal building, which is not where anyone expects to find the oldest and thickest tree on a city's list. The name it carries is Magdalena Abakanowicz's, the sculptor who was for decades a professor in Poznan and whose crowd of headless iron figures stands in the park across the river. The courtyard is part of a building open daily from nine in the morning until ten at night, though the Zamek's own programme occasionally takes the space, so this is the one tree here you might have to come back for. Poland's national register confirms the species and the spot; the age and the girth are the city's own.
Read more and get directions →
6
The Zakrzewski Silver Maple
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · roughly 105 years · Zielone Ogrodki, central Poznan
This is not a Polish tree. Acer saccharinum grows wild in the river bottoms of eastern North America, where it takes the spring floods that kill other species, and it reached European parks as an ornamental fast-grower with a habit of shedding limbs in storms. Poznan's finest example holds 271 centimetres of girth at about 105 years old, which is quick work, and the city made it a natural monument on 16 April 2024, naming it for Professor Zbigniew Zakrzewski. It stands on the Skwer Zielone Ogrodki, the strip of small green squares laid out where Zielona meets Strzelecka, a few minutes from the Old Market Square and free at any hour. The species gives itself away in wind: the leaves are cut into deep, narrow lobes and the undersides are almost white, so a gust turns the whole crown pale for a second and then back again. The press covering the designation called it an exceptionally fine specimen of its kind, which for a silver maple in a Polish city centre is a real compliment: most of them are planted, admired for a few decades and then quietly removed after the first bad storm.
Read more and get directions →
7
The Citadel Defenders' Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 140 years · Cytadela Park, Winiary
Cytadela Park sits on the ruins of a Prussian fortress that became, in February 1945, one of the last and bloodiest German strongholds of the war on this front. Soviet and Polish forces spent nearly a month reducing Fort Winiary before its garrison surrendered, and the city named this oak for the civilians who fought alongside the soldiers: the Citadel Defenders. The council made it a natural monument on 1 April 2021.
The tree itself is unremarkable in the way that matters most: quietly sound. A 2020 tomographic scan, sound pushed through the trunk to map density and rot, found the interior clean, no decay behind 325 centimetres of bark. It stands 30 metres tall with a regular crown, in the park's western section near ul. Za Cytadela.
It is one of only two natural-monument oaks inside Cytadela Park. The other, the Chuikov Oak, stands about 800 metres away, named for the Soviet general who commanded the assault this tree's own name commemorates from the other side. Age here is an estimate, put at 130 to 155 years by the arborists who examined it before designation, old enough to have stood through both the battle and the decades of silence that followed it.
Read more and get directions →
8
The Chuikov Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 185 years · Cytadela Park, Winiary
This oak split itself into a small crowd. At 170 centimetres up, the trunk divides into two parallel stems, and one of those splits again higher still, a rare growth habit that leaves three separate crowns rising from a single 421-centimetre base. It has stood near the Citadel's Garrison Cemetery since around 1840, by the register's estimate, making it the oldest protected tree inside the park by a wide margin.
Poznan named it for Vasily Chuikov, the Soviet general who commanded the 8th Guards Army during the brutal February 1945 battle for the fortress, an unusual honour to find growing in a Polish city park. The oak predates the battle by more than a century and the general's own role in it by longer still; it was already mature when the fort it now shades was an active Prussian stronghold.
Designated a natural monument on 10 June 1979, this is the oldest protection of any tree on this page, decades before Poland's newer wave of monumental-tree designations. Arborists describe it in good health, with only minor dead branches. It stands about 800 metres from the Citadel Defenders' Oak, named for the men who fought against the army this tree's own name honours, close enough to walk both on one visit to the park.
Read more and get directions →
9
The Chrzanowski Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 100 years · Grunwald (Park Wilsona)
Four hundred and eighty four centimetres of trunk for a tree the city puts at only about a hundred years old is a startling ratio, thick enough to raise a real question about whether the age is right. Poznan's own estimate is the only one on record, so the figure stands here flagged rather than treated as settled.
The plane grows in Park Wilsona, home to the Palmiarnia, one of Europe's larger palm houses, and carries the name of Bernard Chrzanowski, a lawyer, independence activist and pioneer of Poland's hiking and tourist-trail movement who died in 1944. The council designated it a natural monument in spring 2025, alongside a ginkgo named for a different Poznan botanist elsewhere in the same park.
Whatever explains the girth, the tree needs no defending on its own terms: a London plane this size, in a park built around a landmark greenhouse, is a destination in its own right. It stands free to reach at any hour, directly opposite the Park Wilsona tram stop, no gate between the street and the trunk.
Read more and get directions →
10
Krzysztof the Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 275 years · Wilda
Poznan's oldest protected tree on this page stands inside a playground fence, which is not where you would expect to find a tree the city dates to as much as three centuries old. The oak took its name, Krzysztof, from Anna Siwczyk, a local artist who helped restore the square around it before her death in 2010, and the name has stuck deeply enough that in 2023 the city's greenery authority grew a batch of seedlings from its acorns and nicknamed them the Krzysztofy.
Trunk circumference runs to 375 centimetres, and an arborist's report at designation put its age between 250 and 300 years and assessed it in very good health with full mechanical resistance, a formal way of saying the wood inside is sound. The council made it a natural monument in late 2017 or early 2018, depending on whether the date used is the register's or the city's own announcement of the vote.
The fence around it belongs to the playground it stands in, run by Poznan's Municipal Greenery Authority and open during ordinary hours, not a barrier put up to keep visitors out. It borders a building used by a local Alzheimer's association, but the ground itself is public, in the Wilda district, a genuine enclave of old growth in one of the city's more built-up corners.
Read more and get directions →