The Oak of Dienzenhofer Gardens

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.