The Ash of Strahov Garden

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.