The Abakanowicz Plane

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.