Prague protects its old trees the same way it protects buildings: since 1992, national law lets the city legally register individual specimens as pamatne stromy, memorial trees, each with its own protection order and a fineable offence for damaging one. Roughly 200 trees currently hold that status across the city. Most of what follows are London planes planted in aristocratic gardens two centuries ago, alongside a monastery ash, an island oak tamed by imperial flood engineers, and a beech that split into two trunks on a 17th century battlefield. All of them are free to visit.
0 of 30 visited in Prague
Photo: Balaban (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
The Beethoven Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · estimated 200-300 years · Mala Strana
The thickest protected tree in Prague has a trunk seven and a half metres around, and its most famous story is almost certainly false. Local guides say Ludwig van Beethoven rested beneath this plane during his 1796 visit to Prague, dreaming of a 19 year old countess while lodging at the nearby Golden Unicorn inn. He was in the city in February. Prague historians point out that picturing a composer dreamily sitting under a bare tree in midwinter is more charming than credible. What is verified is the trunk itself: 752 centimetres around as of 2013, up from 670 in 1996. It grows in the garden of the Grand Priory Palace on Velkoprevorske namesti, towering over the wall that has carried John Lennon graffiti since the 1980s, tall enough that most people photographing the Lennon Wall never look up to notice the tree that shades it. Its exact age is disputed: the Order of Malta's own legend claims the 12th century, which is botanically impossible since this hybrid plane did not exist before 1700, while official records put the planting between 1725 and around 1810. Either way it is very likely the oldest plane tree, and the most massive protected tree of any species, in Prague.
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Photo: Yekaterina Borisova (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
The Plane of Karlovo namesti
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · estimated 160-190 years · Nove Mesto
Prague's most photographed memorial tree earned an unprintable nickname for the shape of one branch. The plane at Karlovo namesti sends a limb down toward the ground before it curls back upward, a silhouette locals have joked about for decades. Planted before the square was landscaped into a public park in 1876, the tree is Prague's most recognisable protected tree, with a trunk measured at nearly eight metres around in 2004 and a crown that spreads across the western half of the park. It has not had an easy two centuries. Restorers opened and cleaned a large cavity in its trunk in 1985, propped up the low branch responsible for its nickname, and in 2013 ringed the whole tree in a fence after years of visitors climbing on the very limb they came to look at. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 7 October 1998 for its growth, age and value as a specimen. Estimates for its exact age disagree, ranging from about 160 to 190 years depending on the source, which would put its planting somewhere between the early 1800s and the 1860s. Nobody has found a planting record to settle it.
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Photo: Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3
The Plane of Kinsky Garden
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · estimated 180-200 years · Smichov, Petrin
The largest tree on all of Petrin hill also lost its own sculpture to theft. In 1928 the sculptor Karel Dvorak placed a statue called The Fourteen Year Old at the foot of this plane in Kinsky Garden, and at some point in the following decades it disappeared. It now sits in a Prague City Museum storeroom, with a replacement reportedly still planned. The tree itself needed no help to become a landmark: at 28 metres tall with a trunk 546 centimetres around, it is visibly larger than anything else growing across the whole of Petrin, a hill covered in parks. It was planted during the first phase of the garden's construction, which ran until 1836, under a design by the Viennese architect Heinrich Koch for the Kinsky family, and Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 30 July 1998 for its growth, age and dendrological value. In 2004 it was one of thirteen Prague trees chosen for a genetic preservation programme that collects material from the city's oldest specimens before disease or storms can take them. For now it still shades the lower, flatter part of the garden nearest the entrance from Kinskeho namesti, exactly where it has stood for close to two centuries.
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Photo: SJu (CC BY-SA 3.0)
4
The Plane of Kampa
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 213 years · Mala Strana, Kampa
A countess planted this tree in 1813 to dress up her family's riverside garden with something exotic, and it has outgrown every other reason anyone remembers her. Barbora Kolowratova Krakovska had the grounds beside the Vltava planted with foreign flowers and trees that year, and this plane is the clearest survivor of her garden, now absorbed into Kampa Park. It reaches 35 metres, taller than most buildings on the island, with a trunk 504 centimetres around, and it anchors the northern end of the park right where visitors enter from beside the Liechtenstein Palace. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 8 October 1998. Its exact planting date is one of the more solid facts on this list. Most of Prague's old plane trees carry an estimated age with a decade or two of margin either side; this one has a year, because someone wrote it down at the time. Kampa itself was still gardens and orchards when the tree went in, well over a century before the 1947 to 1948 landscaping that turned the island into the public park it is today, which means the tree predates the park built around it by more than a hundred years.
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Photo: Sefjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
5
The Twin Beech of Hvezda
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · estimated 230 years · Liboc, Praha 6
One of the two tallest trees on this page stands on a 17th century battlefield and splits into two trunks a few feet off the ground, which is why it is simply named Twin Beech. At 45 metres it beats every other tree here for height by a wide margin, in the Star Game Reserve on Prague's western edge, where the armies of the Bohemian Revolt collided with the Habsburgs in 1620. The beech itself came generations later, planted sometime after 1763, when the reserve was restored and replanted with beeches, oaks and hornbeams following decades of neglect. Its trunk, 508 centimetres around where it forks, now carries a binding to keep the two main stems from splitting apart under their own weight, and a wooden fence around its base, installed after years of visitors carving initials and hearts into the bark. Prague declared it a protected natural monument on 22 August 2001. It stands about 170 metres from the reserve's Brevnov Gate, in sight of the star shaped Renaissance hunting lodge the whole park is named for, a building that has watched over this beech's entire two and a half centuries of growth without ageing anywhere near as gracefully itself.
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Photo: MartinVeselka (CC BY-SA 4.0)
6
The Ginkgo of Stromovka
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · estimated 140-220 years · Bubenec
Two very different ages have been written down for this tree, 80 years apart, and nobody has reconciled them. One record dates its planting to around 1804, from the earliest landscaping of the royal nursery here under the gardener Fuchs. A separate 2016 assessment put its age at only around 130 years. Both figures come from people who study this specific tree, and the gap between them is wide enough that this page states the honest range rather than pick a side: somewhere between 140 and 220 years old. What is not in dispute is the tree itself, a male ginkgo with a trunk 362 centimetres around and a crown 16 metres wide, growing near the old Mistodrzitelsky letohradek, the former Governor's Summer House, in a corner of Stromovka that used to be a nursery bed. Ginkgos are sometimes called living fossils because the species has barely changed in over 200 million years, and this one is among the oldest specimens in the Czech Republic regardless of which age estimate is correct. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree in 2004. Every November its fan shaped leaves turn a single uniform gold and drop within days, the trick every ginkgo performs.
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Photo: Sefjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
7
The Oak of Cisarsky ostrov
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · estimated 190-200 years · Bubenec, Trojsky ostrov
Prague's very first legally protected oak grows on an island that used to flood every spring until imperial engineers tamed it. Cisarsky ostrov, Emperor's Island, took its name from Habsburg era work to control the Vltava, and this pedunculate oak has stood on its embankment road since sometime in the early 1800s, watching barges pass on the navigation canal beside it rather than the river itself. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 26 October 1994, the first oak in the city to receive that status, ahead of every other oak now on this list. Its trunk splits into branches unusually low, at just a metre and a half up, and the crown that results spreads wider than the tree is tall, a shape typical of an oak that grew alone in open ground rather than crowded by a forest. A 2013 measurement put the girth at 457 centimetres, and the tree is estimated at around 190 to 200 years old, above average for its age and size according to the city's own survey. It stands about 200 metres from the footbridge that connects the island to Stromovka, on a quiet embankment road most visitors to the park next door never think to cross.
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Photo: Sefjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
8
The Ash of Strahov Garden
European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) · estimated 210-230 years · Hradcany, Strahov
The tallest single trunk on this page grows in the one corner of Strahov Monastery the monks decided to share. This ash reaches 37 metres in the Great Strahov Garden, the only part of the monastery complex left open to the public; the rest remains cloistered grounds. It began as an orchard tree in a working fruit garden, planted around the turn of the 19th century, long before anyone thought to protect it. Its trunk splits into three thick limbs about two metres above the ground and keeps climbing, measuring 513 centimetres around at the split as of a 2013 survey, a girth that puts it among the most massive ash trees recorded anywhere in the Czech Republic. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 13 October 2007. From the garden beneath it, visitors get one of the better free views in the city, Prague Castle and the rooftops of Mala Strana laid out below the hill, a vista the tree has been growing tall enough to share in for two centuries. At an estimated 210 to 230 years old, it was already well established when the garden's monastic orchard still supplied the friars with fruit rather than a footpath for tourists.
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Photo: Limojoe (CC BY-SA 3.0)
9
The Field Maple of the Seminary Garden
Field Maple (Acer campestre) · estimated 160-170 years · Mala Strana, Petrin
Field maples are usually shrubs. Left alone, most stay a scrubby hedge tree, rarely climbing past a few metres. This one, in the Seminary Garden on Petrin's eastern slope, ignored the script and grew into a proper 24 metre tree, the only field maple in Prague to earn individual legal protection because of it. Its trunk measured 285 centimetres around in a 2013 survey, thick for a species whose Czech name, babyka, is usually attached to something closer to a bush. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree on 19 June 2009, and it stands above a small pond just below the Petrinske Terasy restaurant, roughly 250 metres north of the Nebozizek cable car stop, a stretch of the garden slightly off the paths most visitors to Petrin actually walk. At an estimated 160 to 170 years old, it has had more than enough time to prove it is the exception rather than the rule for its species. People who study field maples cite examples like this one as evidence the plant's usual shrub form is a matter of circumstance, not biology. Give it room, apparently, and a field maple will eventually decide to become a tree instead.
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Photo: Dave Richardson (CC BY)
10
Neruda's Pear Tree
European Pear (Pyrus communis) · estimated 190 years · Mala Strana, Petrin
This pear tree remembers a poet's birthplace that no longer exists. Jan Neruda, the 19th century writer whose name now marks Prague's most photographed street on the other side of the hill, was born in an army barracks that once stood near this spot on the eastern slope of Petrin; the barracks are long demolished, but the pear tree that stood nearby when he was a boy is still bearing fruit. Prague's tree survey estimates its age at around 190 years, measured a trunk 292 centimetres around in 2015, and calls it exceptionally old for its species, since wild pears rarely reach anywhere close to two centuries. Unlike most trees on this list, it carries no formal legal protection; the city added it to its inventory of significant trees only in 2013, one tier below the memorial tree status that comes with fines for damaging a tree. It grows at a quiet path crossing in the Seminary Garden, in the lower orchard section between the Petrinske Terasy restaurant and Hellichova street, a former monastery garden open to the public since 1930. Most visitors climbing Petrin for the views pass within a few metres of it without knowing an old pear tree, let alone one tied to Neruda, is there at all.
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Photo: Matej Batha (CC BY-SA 2.5)
11
The Oak of Dienzenhofer Gardens
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · estimated 155-165 years · Smichov
The street on the far side of this oak is called V Botanice, In the Botanical Garden, and there is no botanical garden. Prague's tree register calls the oak the only living reminder of the one that used to be here, which makes a 160 year old tree the last exhibit of a collection nobody can visit. It stands at the northeastern corner of Dienzenhoferovy sady, a riverside strip of grass named after Kilian Ignac Dientzenhofer, the Baroque architect who put a pavilion on this ground in 1735. Traffic now runs on three sides of it, feeding the Jirasek Bridge, and the tree has answered the way open grown oaks do, by pushing its lowest limbs sideways instead of up until the crown measured 23 metres across in 2009 against a height of only 20. Its trunk has thickened from 350 centimetres in 2004 to 393 in 2017, which is a tree still laying on wood rather than holding station. Prague protected it on 17 February 2005. Surveyors keep recording its condition as very good, which for an oak marooned on a traffic island in a European capital is a small piece of luck.
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12
The Red Oak of Shooters' Island
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · estimated 125-140 years · Strelecky ostrov, Praha 1
An American tree turns the best colour in central Prague, on an island where Bohemian archers used to practise. Strelecky ostrov, Shooters' Island, is named for the crossbow and longbow ranges that operated on it from the reign of Charles IV, and its northern half is now a lawn under big trees with the Vltava running past on both sides. The red oak in the middle of that half arrived from North America by way of the European nursery trade, and at 352 centimetres around it is the largest oak on the island and, by the city's own reckoning, the largest red oak in the centre of Prague. It was added to the register of significant trees in 2013 at an estimated 125 years, which places its planting close to the landscaping that converted a shooting ground into a public park. Red oaks do one thing better than any native Czech tree and they do it late: the leaves go scarlet and then deep rust through the second half of October, long after the limes on the embankment have given up. Thousands of people cross Most Legii directly above this tree every day. The staircase down to it is on the bridge itself.
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Photo: Huhulenik (CC BY 3.0)
13
The Bonsai Ginkgo of Na Slupi
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · estimated 150-165 years · Nove Mesto, Na Slupi
A tree five metres tall with the trunk of one twice that height has been interfered with. The ginkgo by the greenhouse door in the Charles University botanical garden measures about 343 centimetres around at chest height and goes almost nowhere upward, spreading and drooping instead, and the accepted explanation is that somebody grew it in a barrel and pruned it like a bonsai for years before it was ever put in the ground. It carries its own cultivar name, 'Praga', probably descended from the weeping 'Pendula'. It went in around 1860 to 1870, which means it was standing here before the garden was laid out around it. Czech readers may know its outline without knowing the tree, because a ginkgo leaf is the emblem of Jaroslav Foglar's 1965 novel Stinadla se bouri and this specimen is the one usually credited with the idea, though the older ginkgo in Riegrovy sady has a claim too and Foglar never settled it. Prague listed it as a significant tree in 2013. In November the whole low crown turns one flat yellow and lets go inside a week, which on a tree this wide leaves a ring of leaves on the grass rather than a drift.
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14
Masaryk's Lime
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · estimated over 200 years · Hradcany, Prague Castle
A president picked a tree, and an architect built a terrace around it. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, installed at Prague Castle from 1918, took to sitting on a bare rise above the Deer Moat under a lime already more than a century old, so he set Josip Plecnik, the Slovene architect he had put in charge of remaking the castle, to make the spot worth sitting in. Between 1922 and 1924 Plecnik terraced the slope in stone, planted it with vines and left the lime standing at the centre of a three quarter circle platform. Masaryk's own bench did not survive. Two stone ones now flank the tree, which the castle's own account puts at over 200 years old. Then the place disappeared: from 1948 the entire moat was a guarded military zone, shut for four decades, and it was Vaclav Havel who had it opened again, with the viewpoint restored in 1996. The trunk is the one thing the sources will not agree on, 249 centimetres in one survey and 349 in another, a gap too wide to split. The view is not in dispute. The Archbishop's Palace and the cathedral line up below you, from a bench under a tree, which is what the whole thing was built for.
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15
The Elm of Ruzova Street
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · estimated 190 years · Nove Mesto
Most of Europe's big elms are dead, and this one is standing on a side street between Wenceslas Square and the main station. Dutch elm disease, a fungus carried between trees by bark beetles, went through the continent in two waves last century and removed elms so thoroughly that a mature one is now a curiosity rather than an ordinary sight. The elm at Ruzova 941/2 has lived through both waves and shows no sign of either. It is a European white elm, the species with lopsided leaves and papery seed discs that ripen in May, 23 metres tall with a trunk 335 centimetres around, growing on a scrap of ground that was a front garden before the block turned into offices and hotels. The crown fills the courtyard behind the railings and leans out over the pavement, which is where you stand to look at it. Prague gave it legal protection only on 15 April 2022, roughly 190 years into its life, having put a fence around its base the year before. Elms that shrug off the fungus are studied as possible parents for resistant stock, so this one may yet turn out to be useful as well as old.
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Photo: The photonaut (CC BY-SA 4.0)
16
The Old Town's Only Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · estimated 165-180 years · Stare Mesto, Petrska ctvrt
The Old Town has exactly one legally protected oak and it grows on a corner nobody photographs. Rasnovka is a scrap of a square in the north of the Old Town behind the Convent of Saint Agnes, with the early Gothic church of the Holy Saviour on one side and the functionalist offices of the city's road authority on the other. The oak stands between them, planted around 1850, when this quarter was still mills, timber yards and river trade rather than a conservation area. It is a pedunculate oak, the ordinary Czech oak of field boundaries and village greens, doing the unusual thing of reaching 19 metres in the middle of a city block, and its trunk has gone from 299 centimetres in 2010 to 321 in 2017. Prague protected it on 24 March 2001, and the last survey found no damage worth recording. It is about six centuries younger than the church beside it and eighty years older than the office block, which is a fair summary of what it is doing there: the one living thing on the square that watched both of its neighbours turn up.
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Photo: Jan Polák (CC BY-SA 3.0)
17
The Plane of Nove Mlyny
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia)
The London plane is an accident. It did not exist before the seventeenth century, when an oriental plane and an American one crossed somewhere in a European garden and produced a tree that turned out to be almost impossible to kill in a city.
That accident is why planes line so many European streets, and why one of them stands on the corner of Nové Mlýny and Klimentská, opposite the church of St Clement, in the quiet Petrská quarter a couple of streets back from the Vltava. Prague's register of protected trees measured its trunk at 342 centimetres in 2017, and it has been adding to that figure ever since, because planes grow quickly. The register's note claims nothing grander than what it is: a locally dominant tree, above the average of its kind in size and age, protected on that basis. No planting date has been published, and that single entry is the whole of the evidence.
Plane bark is why the species won the nineteenth century. It sheds in plates instead of thickening, carrying off a year of soot and grime with it, which kept planes alive in industrial cities that killed nearly everything else. The shedding leaves the familiar camouflage of cream, olive and grey, and it shows best in winter, when there is nothing on the branches to distract from it.
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18
The Elm of Zatory
European White Elm (Ulmus laevis) · roughly 190 years · Holesovice
An elm marks a bus terminus outside Nadrazi Holesovice, and it is the last thing standing from a street. Na Zatorach once ran through old Holesovice, cleared in stages from the 1950s into the late 1970s: first for a concrete plant, then for the railway yard, then for the metro station and bus depot that occupy the ground today. One house, kept for its old street number, and this elm are what is left of it.
Prague's register of significant trees measured the trunk at 2.26 metres round in 2016 and put the tree at about 180 years old that year, which puts it near 190 now. The write-ups behind that figure trace back to the same 2016 survey rather than to two separate measurements, so treat the age as an estimate carried from one source, not a settled fact.
The species explains why it is the one tree that made it. European white elm tolerates wet, disturbed ground better than most trees, which is exactly what a rail yard and a bus turning circle produce, and it carries more resistance to Dutch elm disease than the common elm that wiped out most of the continent's street elms in the twentieth century. It stands where a demolished neighbourhood ends and a metro line begins, four kilometres north of the old town, ringed by the bus turning circle that is now the closest thing Zatory has to an address.
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19
The Hungarian Oak of Italska Street
Hungarian Oak (Quercus frainetto) · estimated 145-170 years · Vinohrady
This oak reached Italska Street before the hospital did. Quercus frainetto is a Balkan and southeast European tree rather than a Czech one, and this specimen went in with the original garden landscaping of the ground above the main railway station's tracks, well before the building it now shares a lawn with was put up.
Both sources measure it at 291 centimetres round, from a survey in 2013. Its age is the part that will not settle. The national register, quoted by Czech Wikipedia, gives about 140 years as of 2019. The Agentura Koniklec survey behind prazskestromy.cz says nearer 155. Read together that puts the tree somewhere between 145 and 170 years old, and nobody has offered anything to close the gap.
Prague listed it as a pamatny strom, a protected memorial tree, on 7 March 1998, and the state's assessors rate its condition very good. It is not the largest Hungarian oak in the city. Another registered one at Palata stands 24 metres tall with 335 centimetres of trunk, so this tree holds second place in a field of two.
It grows in the grounds of the Italska Street clinic, the former Railway Hospital, near the entrance from Helenska. The ground is not gated off during clinic hours, the same open institutional lawn as any hospital garden.
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20
The Oak of U Malvazinky
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 170 years · Smichov
You cannot get to this oak, and you do not need to. It stands on private ground between two apartment buildings on U Malvazinky, and Czech Wikipedia says plainly what to expect: nepristupny, ale z ulice dobre viditelny. Inaccessible, but well visible from the street. Look at it from the pavement and leave the trunk alone. The register's coordinate marks the tree itself rather than a surveyed spot to stand, so expect to find your own angle from the road.
It went in around 1855, a survivor of the tree cover that grew on this Smichov slope before the houses did. When Prague protected it as a pamatny strom on 3 February 2001, its trunk measured 265 centimetres round. A 2013 survey found 281. Both sources put its age at about 160 years as of 2016, which makes it roughly 170 now, and the state rates its condition very good.
Its branches run long and low in most directions, the shape a tree takes when nothing crowds it early.
Two hundred metres east stood the Malvazinka estate. Its land became the Malvazinky cemetery in 1876 and, after 1948, a state sanatorium. The oak watched that whole sequence from the open ground between numbers 28 and 30, which is where it has stood the whole time.
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Photo: Kalokagathia123 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
21
The Plane of Jezerka Park
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 210 years · Nusle
The park came second. This plane was planted around 1815, and Prague did not begin laying out Park Jezerka around the old Jezerka estate until 1949, by which time the tree had been standing on the slope for more than a century. It reaches 36 metres and grows beside the small pond fed by the estate's lower spring.
Its waistline is the one figure nobody has settled. Czech Wikipedia gives 473 centimetres and no date for the measurement. The Agentura Koniklec survey taped it at 517 in 2013. A Koniklec map from 2017 records 525. Those numbers do not so much contradict each other as catch one growth curve at three moments, and the tree is still working on it.
On the age the two sources agree: about 200 years as of 2016, so roughly 210 now. The estate building beside it was rebuilt as a chateau in 1835, when this plane was around twenty years old, and that same building now holds the Divadlo Na Jezerce theatre. Everything a visitor sees here except the tree and the spring arrived after it did.
Prague protected it as a pamatny strom on 8 February 2001, and the state rates its health very good. The park is free and open at any hour, which makes this the easiest of Prague's giants to walk up to and stand under.
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Photo: Sefjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
22
The Oak of Na Cibulkach Forest Park
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 200 years · Kosire, Praha 5
A crack runs up to eight metres down one side of this oak, and the conservation register still lists it as standing.
Prague's database has carried the tree since June 2007 and refreshed the entry in August 2024, hollow and vertical split and all. It went in around 1820, when the Cibulka estate above Kosire was being laid out as a landscape park. The estate house is a ruin today. The park outlived it and was made the Kosire-Motol nature park in 1991, which is how an oak planted for one family's private view ended up on public ground.
Neighbouring trees shade it and it has grown accordingly, upward rather than outward: a long straight trunk that forks into three branches high overhead and carries a narrow crown to 24 metres. Round the trunk it measures 408 centimetres, which is a serious oak anywhere else and the slimmer of the two here. Its registered neighbour 90 metres away, planted at about the same time, reaches 525.
The numbers say the crack has not finished it. A tape put round the trunk in 2011 read 394 centimetres; the register's 2024 update reads 408. Fourteen centimetres in thirteen years is a tree still laying down wood. Nobody has cored it, so the age is not a measurement: the register dates the planting to about 1820, which puts the tree near two centuries.
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Photo: Aktron (CC BY-SA 3.0)
23
The Oak with the Bizarre Trunk of Na Cibulkach
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 210 years · Kosire, Praha 5
Czech conservation law has an official name for this tree, and the name is the oak with the bizarre trunk.
It earns it. The trunk swells like a barrel, 525 centimetres round, then tapers and breaks into a crown so modest that the whole tree stops at 17 metres. Oaks that thick are usually far taller. This one put its two centuries into width.
It went into the ground around 1815, in the landscape park laid out at the Cibulka estate, and it has outlasted what it was planted for. The house above it is a ruin. The wood around it became the Kosire-Motol nature park in 1991, and Prague's register of protected trees added the oak itself in March 2008.
A survey in 2016 taped the trunk at 525 centimetres and the register's 2024 refresh carries the same number to the centimetre. That survey called the tree's condition deteriorated, which on an oak of this age describes a stage rather than an ending; the register still lists it as standing. Nobody has counted its rings, so the two centuries come from that planting date and should be read loosely.
Ninety metres away stands the park's other registered oak, taller, slimmer and cracked down one side. Seeing them within five minutes of each other is the argument for coming out to Kosire at all: same park, same decade, two completely different animals.
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Photo: Aktron (CC BY 3.0)
24
The Beech of Brevnovska Gate, Hvezda
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 235 years · Liboc, Praha 6
Two invading armies stripped this wood before the tree standing here was ever planted. French troops took the game reserve's timber during the War of the Austrian Succession, Prussian troops finished the work in the Seven Years' War, and after 1763 Hvezda was replanted with beech, oak and hornbeam. This beech is one of the oldest survivors of that replanting.
Assessments put it between 210 and 250 years old, revised to roughly 230 in 2019, so the arithmetic and the history agree with each other. It stands 50 metres inside the Brevnovska gate, on the main path toward the star-shaped Hvezda summer palace, and it is one of the tallest trees in the reserve: 34 metres when it was measured in 2009, with a crown 26 metres across and the heavy buttressed root flare that old beeches put down around their base.
It is also still growing. The trunk read 373 centimetres round in 2009, 380 in 2013 and 386 in the register's 2024 update. Its health was assessed as very good with no significant damage, which is not nothing for a tree of this age standing a step from the reserve's busiest path; the maintenance file recommends a safety prune for that same reason.
Do not confuse it with the twin beech 230 metres away near the same gate. Separate tree, separate register entry, and this is the one on the main path.
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Photo: Aktron (CC BY-SA 3.0)
25
The Oak of Libocka Gate, Hvezda
Sessile Oak (Quercus petraea) · roughly 175 years · Liboc, Praha 6
Prague's own conservation register cannot decide what this tree is. It has been listed since 2002 as a pedunculate oak, Quercus robur, but a 2015 update to the same register filed its data under Quercus petraea, the sessile oak, and the leaf photographs the register itself attaches are petiolate: stalked at the base, the sessile oak's diagnostic feature, not the pedunculate's near-stalkless leaf. Oak makes up 57 percent of the trees in the Hvezda reserve, nearly all of it pedunculate, and if the register's own photographs are read correctly, this crooked, gnarled specimen is the reserve's only individually registered sessile oak among them.
Whichever species it is, it has grown steadily since a formal survey first measured it in 2001, when its trunk read 345 centimetres round. By 2009 that had reached 352, and by 2013, 356, the figure the register still carries today. Assessors call its health excellent apart from a few dry branches and note it is actively maintained, which for an eighteen-metre tree with a sixteen-metre crown standing beside the reserve's busiest path is not surprising.
Nobody has cored it, so 175 years is an estimate rather than a count: the register put it near 165 in 2016. It has been protected since October 2002 and stands right of the main path from the Libocka gate toward the star-shaped Hvezda summer palace, past a stand of registered horse chestnuts and just before the reserve's playground.
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Photo: Sefjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The Oak on the Dam of Libocky Pond
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 185 years · Liboc, Praha 6
On paper this oak lost seven centimetres of waistline in nine years, which is not something living oaks do. A measurement taken in June 2015 put it at 424 centimetres round. The Czech nature agency's own 2024 update of the memorial-tree register says 417. Somebody remeasured, or somebody rounded, and the register's newer figure is the one carried here. Either way it is a big tree: more than four metres of trunk standing on the northwest dam of Libocky pond, between the water and the footpath, with nothing next to it competing for light.
That open position is why the state protected it on 13 July 2004. The designation cites its dominance and its typical pond-edge habit, and draws a circle of protection thirteen metres out from the trunk.
Nobody has dated it. Working from the girth and the growth rates Prague's other registered pedunculate oaks run at, a shade over two centimetres a year, it lands somewhere between 165 and 210 years old. That is an arithmetic answer rather than a measured one, and if anyone has a better figure we would like to hear it.
The dam itself was rebuilt in 2017, gaining stone steps and a wooden rest platform; people fish from the embankment. The oak came through the works and the last visit on record found it in very good health.
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27
The Beech Below the Summer Palace, Hvezda
European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) · roughly 150 years · Liboc, Praha 6
This beech was protected for its height, not its age. When Prague listed it as a memorial tree on 9 September 2002, the reason given was that it is the tallest tree in the beech stand growing in this corner of Obora Hvezda: roughly 40 metres, on a trunk that stays straight almost the whole way up, with root buttresses flaring out where it meets the ground. The protection zone is a circle eleven metres out from the bark.
It is also one of the few trees here whose growing you can watch in the paperwork. The girth has been taken three times: 306 centimetres in the older listing, 332 in September 2013, 337 at the nature agency's 2024 update. Thirty centimetres of new wood in two decades, laid down while visitors walked past below it.
The age is softer than the measurements. The best any source offers is approximately 150 years, stated that loosely by the survey that recorded the 2013 girth, and it stays loose here rather than being tidied into a planting date. Add the years since and it is a little more.
It stands on the path most people take down from the Hvezda summer palace toward the Ruzynska gate. Two other beeches in the reserve carry the same protection and are easily confused with it; this is the one below the palace.
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The Oak Behind the Ranger's Lodge, Čimický háj
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · estimated around 190 years · Bohnice, Praha 8
Two great oaks stand behind this forestry lodge and only one of them is still alive. This is the living one, and it is the smaller and younger of the pair. The other, where the path meets the lodge, is five metres round and about three hundred years old, and what is left of it is a hollow trunk carrying a thin ring of living crown at the top, an owl inside and a colony of bees; it keeps its protection as a habitat rather than as a living tree.
This oak is the one still putting on wood. It measured 3.55 metres round in 2011 and 3.81 when the register came back to it in August 2024, and it stands 32.5 metres tall, its crown carried upward rather than out. A 2013 survey put its age at about 180 years, which makes it roughly 190 now. Both trees were protected on the same day in 2004, and both sat for a portrait in 1969, when the painter Jaroslav Turek put the pair on one canvas. Only one of them has changed much since.
Čimický háj around them is working woodland that Bohnice and Kobylisy have turned into weekend ground, walked, run and cycled through all year, and the building in front of the tree is still a forestry lodge. That 2024 measurement is the newest hard record anyone has of this oak. If you get out there, tell us how it looks.
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The Oak of Pod Labuťkou Street
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · estimated around 180 years · Libeň, Praha 8
In 2010 the Czech state drew a twelve-metre protected circle around a tree on a residential street in Libeň. This is it: an oak opposite number 13 on Pod Labuťkou, standing on ground that used to be a children's playground, under a slope grown over with scrub.
It is not a giant. The trunk came to 3.00 metres round in a 2016 survey and 3.14 when the register was updated in August 2024, and the tree reaches twenty metres. What it has is a shape street trees are almost never allowed to keep: a bushy crown whose lowest branches run all the way down to the ground, so the whole tree is one piece from the pavement up rather than a trunk with foliage parked on top. The same survey rated its health very good, noting a few dry branches and algae in the bark crevices, which is what the damp of this slope leaves on a trunk.
Its age is an estimate and not a record. The surveyors put it at about 170 years in 2016, so somewhere near 180 now. Beyond those two measurements and a short Czech account of them, almost nothing about this oak is written down anywhere. If you know more of its story, tell us.
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Photo: Jan Polák (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The Oak of Kobylisy
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · estimated around 200 years · Kobylisy, Praha 8
For its first century this oak stood inside a military shooting range. The Kobylisy range closed in 1938, the Ďáblice housing estate went up across the land afterwards, and the ground under the tree was turned into the estate's park. The oak stayed where it was and is now the largest thing in it.
A 2016 survey measured it at 3.80 metres round and 27 metres tall. The register came back in October 2024 with 4.36 metres, and the gap between those two numbers is wider than eight years of growth on its own explains, so read the waistline as the distance between two people with a tape rather than as a precise figure. By either of them it is a heavier trunk than the living oak behind the forestry lodge in Čimický háj, or the one on Pod Labuťkou down in Libeň, both of them a couple of kilometres from here.
The same surveyors dated its planting to around 1825, which puts it near two hundred years old, and it has the build of a tree given room: one straight sturdy stem, and above it a fan of branches all running upward. Protection came in January 2000 and takes in nineteen metres of ground in every direction from the trunk. Nothing more recent than that October 2024 measurement has been published about it, so the newest thing known about this oak is its waistline.
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