The Paczoski Plane

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.